


Encouragement

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV), Mr. and Mrs. North
Genre: Blackmail, Canon-Typical Drinking, Canon-Typical Smoking, F/M, Meddling, Other, POV Outsider, Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale (Good Omens), ineffable husbands, just doing their jobs, murder discussion, period-typical heteronormativity, preventing murder, straight passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24663958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: Pamela and Jerry North hit postwar London on their way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where they meet a young couple with a problem they don't discuss, and the mysterious Anthony J. Crowley and Mr. Fell, who insist they don't know each other and about whom no one will talk. Has their bad luck about finding bodies followed them to Europe, or can this one be prevented, for once?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley, Pam North/Jerry North
Comments: 72
Kudos: 114





	1. Wednesday, 7:30 PM - 11:00 P.M.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know whether my failure to find any fics about Mr. and Mrs North on AO3 indicates a failure on my part to use the search function correctly, ignorance among AO3 users about the couple, or that the Norths’ marriage is too trouble free (give or take a corpse or kidnapping) to irritate the pearls of fanfiction into existence in the oysterish minds of the fen. I am aware that, if others are as prone as I am to skip crossover fics which involve unfamiliar canons, I may be condemning myself to languish unread by crossing the Ineffable Husbands with a more obscure couple. But languishing unread is always a danger, and not an important consideration. I tried to write in such a way that anyone with a general familiarity with the 20th century trope of the Married Sleuths would be able to manage without specific familiarity with this exemplar of it. Suffice to say that the Norths are New Yorkers, they’re charming, they’re privileged but don’t realize it, they love cats, and I am hardly exaggerating at all about the martinis. 
> 
> It feels strange to comfort-binge a traditional mystery series in which the police are trustworthy during a time when the police in my country are rioting in support of their right to murder the disadvantaged. There’s no accounting for coping mechanisms. The style of the books is surprisingly hard to pastiche. I have made explicit certain headcanons for which there is little or no textual basis in the source material, because if I didn’t what would be the use of ficcing at all?
> 
> As for the Good Omens element, familiarity with my other fics in the fandom is not necessary, but the presentation of the characters is consistent with them. 
> 
> The Frankfurt Book Fair, the oldest and largest trade show in the book industry, was suspended during World War II for obvious reasons, and resumed in 1949. I have not exerted myself to fit this work into the Norths’ timeline, but October 1949 or ‘50 should be close enough when envisioning clothes etc.

Pamela North had never met such an empty ladies’ room in her life, though she would have expected British ones to be busy all the time, because of all that tea. No one came in, not even as she lingered touching up her makeup and making sure her nylons were behaving and hoping the aspirin would start doing its job sooner than it usually did.

On the way out, Pam almost walked into a waiter, passing with a full tray of martinis, so she got one (with an olive but one must make do), and went around the corner to the railing of the mezzanine, to look out over the main floor of the party and locate Jerry; only she couldn’t. The chandelier shone almost directly into her eyes up here, and every male publisher, author, editor, and agent in London seemed to be wearing the same suit and haircut, with only slight variations in color to distinguish them. She couldn’t tell whether she was cross at Jerry for not getting a more unusual haircut, or at herself for not buying better suits for him. Mostly, though, she was cross at the headache, for not understanding that it wasn’t wanted, and going away. The lights shone all the way to the back of the ache, so she turned away from them, and saw that the hotel had provided a couple of wing chairs, with floor lamps, and a low table with the _Times_ on it, and thought perhaps if she turned off the floor lamps and sat there long enough to drink her martini, she might feel better, and then she would find Jerry.

So she sat in the wing chair furthest from all light, sipped her martini (which wasn’t very good, even allowing for the olive), and closed her eyes. The ambient din of a too-large cocktail party in a space designed for dances and wedding receptions should keep her from dropping off. She hadn’t been able to sleep on the airplane, due in part to the strain of keeping it in the air by force of will, and the five hour time difference between London and New York hadn’t let her get to bed early enough or sleep late enough to make up for the twenty airplane hours. The wing chair was mostly comfortable, but the hotel had provided neither an ottoman nor a cat. Did Martini miss Pam’s lap as much as Pam’s lap missed her? Dorian’s friend who needed a place to stay for a few weeks had seemed nice, but did she really understand the technique for getting in and out of the apartment without letting a cat out? Martini had still been hiding from her when the Norths left. If Dorian visited, she might come out and get some lap that way. That wasn’t as nice a thought as Mrs. North had intended it to be.

Pam didn’t exactly wish she hadn’t come, but she did wish she could skip this part, the part with tiredness and headache and missing Martini and not knowing anybody or being able to tell people apart, even Jerry, and not understanding anything anybody said to her until she’d worried it over in her mind long enough to miss the next thing they said. She had only found the ladies’ because the woman she’d asked had pointed. She needed practice listening to British accents, and, conveniently, two voices started speaking gibberish a few feet away, in the direction of the railing. It wasn’t really eavesdropping if you didn’t understand them, but as she focused on the sounds they began to make sense, in a laggard way.

“...your sort of affair.”

“Eh, you know what they say, where there’s free drinks there’s opportunity.”

_No one says that, but maybe that’s only in New York._

“If only opportunities for free drinks, I suppose. Though in this case you seem to wart yourself, as these are worth exactly what we paid for them.”

_Wart yourself? That couldn’t be right._

“Pour a gel, budget tighten gain? Here.”

“Oh! Yes, that’s much better.”

 _There must be a pay bar somewhere, with a better bartender. I hope Jerry’s found it. I should go find him. This is a terrible drink. Barely a martini at all._

“What about you, then? I didn’t think you went to these dos anymore.”

“No, no, not ever really, not like this. Even Oscar would find this bastard stepchild of a party and a business meeting a bit much, I think. You needn’t sneer so, just because you never got to go; who’s fault is that?”

“M’not sneering, ‘smy natural expression, and anyway, it wasn’t my fault. Or yours. Or Oscar’s even.”

During the dismissive hum that followed, a picture formed in Pam’s head: an older pair who would have been a couple if circumstances were different, but circumstances weren’t, and now the man wore the same suit and haircut as every other man this year, and the woman stood so close her sleeve brushed his, neither needing anyone else now that they’d found each other in cocktail party wasteland.

“What’re you changing the subject for? Zair something I’m not supposed to know about?”

“I’m not changing the subject.”

“Then why’d you drag Oscar into it?” 

_Oscar must be circumstances._

Huffy sighs are the same with all accents. “I didn’t - oh, never mind. I’ve nothing in particular in hand, but one of my old neighbors is here with her husband and when her mother mentioned it the other day I had a, a sort of hunch -“

_“Husband?”_

“War hero. Wrote a book. Which is how they got invited.”

What was wrong with the woman’s neighbors, to prompt that skeptical husband? Mrs. North couldn’t tell if their mismatched accents were more like the Bronx vs. Manhattan, or Manhattan vs. Boston. They could even be like Park Avenue vs. Harlem or the Bowery, she wouldn’t know. Or maybe it was their voices, rather than their accents, that were mismatched.

“You might remember her. You almost hit her bicycle with your car once, in the blackout.”

“I never - oh, the one that roped the rims when she couldn’t get rubber? _I_ didn’t almost hit _her_ , _she_ almost hit _me_! Cheeky little gibberish -“

_“My dear!”_

“Well, she was! And - _that_ one? _Husband?_ ”

“You needn’t be an ass about it. They’re doing the best they can.”

“All right, all right, don’t geisha nicker sintwixt. So you crashed this do to keep an eye on her, zatit?”

An anxious hum. “I’m skaty nawfully close to meddling, I know, but -“

“Angel? Whatteru fraida?” The man’s voice sank away, then, into a gentle reassuring murmur. He was almost certainly taking her hand, and whatever they were talking about, it was something serious, to make the woman’s voice spike like that. Pam couldn’t leave now without walking straight past them and embarrassing everybody. Jerry would be wondering where she was, and oh, her _head_ \- 

Pam shifted, put her hands to her temples, and made a little snort that she hoped sounded like someone waking up. She felt rather than heard someone approach. The woman asked: “Are you all right, my dear?”

Mrs. North opened her eyes, and saw a plump man, in a light suit unlike any other suit at the party, with a halo of curly hair unlike any other haircut at the party. Even with the light behind him, his eyes were very blue and his smile very kind. In combination they were a bit intense for comfort. “I must’ve fallen asleep,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep on the plane, and my head hurts - wait, no. I thought the aspirin wasn’t helping at all but I’m much better now.” Literally, _now_ ; the pain had vanished in the interval between opening her eyes and opening her mouth. “I hope I can remember what kind of aspirin it was.” 

“Or perhaps it was the nap,” suggested the man, in the woman’s voice, only it didn’t sound like a woman’s now she could see him. British accents were even more confusing than she’d thought.

“I suppose so.” Pam scooted forward in the chair and got her feet under her. “I’d better go find my husband.”

The man who should have been a woman stepped back to make room for her. The highball glass in his hand smelled like wine instead of highball. The only other person on the mezzanine leaned against the railing, surveying the party as if he had nothing to do with anyone, and though his dark red hair was properly slicked down his iteration of the universal suit was as black as a tuxedo, his tie was bright red, and he wore sunglasses. He did not appear to notice her as she passed him, scanning the crowd from the head of the stairs.

 _I should get Jerry a suit that color. Not that tie, though. Why isn’t either of them a woman? Oh, there’s Jerry, good!_

Jerry held one of the substandard martinis and stood with two men and a woman - gray, charcoal; slightly too bright teal in last year’s style, eyes too bright, making her look younger than she probably was. Pam found her eyes and offered up reassurance in a smile, as Jerry made introductions. Duncan Smythe. Ernest Bell. Mrs. Ernest Bell, Maggie, with a square jaw and short hair and a general air of being on the front lines determined to do her duty. “I’d thought you’d gotten lost,” said Jerry.

“I sat down for a minute to let the aspirin have time to work, and it did,” said Pam. “It was very good aspirin. I had a martini, too, but it was terrible and I didn’t finish it.”

“They’re all terrible,” said Duncan Smythe, taking responsibility, as a London publisher, for London bar service. “There’s a legal limit on how good the cocktails can be at one of these things.”

“I think there’s a pay bar somewhere,” said Pam. “At least, someone on the mezzanine had wine in a highball glass, and he can hardly have gotten it from a waiter.”

Jerry, Maggie, and Ernest looked hopeful. “That seems unlikely,” said Duncan. “Perhaps it was brought in from outside.” Ernest, Maggie, and Jerry looked downcast. 

Duncan and Jerry talked about what to expect in Frankfurt. Maggie and Ernest looked desperate, her chin raised, his tucked down while his shoulders tried to hunch up. All the young men one met these days were ex-soldiers, even as the War receded further and further behind them; Pam hadn’t seen a proper slouch like that in years. “Why cocktail parties, I always wonder,” Pam said, accepting her duty of creating conversation. “Authors almost always hate them. Most authors wouldn’t be, if they were the sorts of people who liked parties. So much of writing is being in a room by yourself, isn’t it?”

Ernest made sounds that transformed into “If you can get the room to yourself” on their way from Pam’s ear to her brain. She could tell by the way he moved his mouth that he was working hard to speak precisely, like someone from the Deep South trying to render himself comprehensible to a New Yorker. Everything about him worked hard: the cleanest shave Pam had ever seen, the sharpest crease the pants could hold. “I kept having to move the typewriter so Maggie could get dinner on, or reach the cupboard, or what have you.” He fixed his eyes on his wife, admiringly. “It’s a wonder she never chased me out with a broom.”

“No more wonder than that you never told me off for interrupting you,” said Maggie, looking back at him the same way. In heels she was taller than he was. “We both had our work to do, and not enough room to do it, but we made it through, and now we’ve got a proper flat instead of a bedsit, so it’s all worth it.”

The lag between speech and comprehension got shorter, and the conversation got easier. Pam, after all, knew how to do this. Since they did not, and were anxious to learn, her handicap vanished. _It’s like teaching someone to dance. Someone ought to give cocktail party lessons for new authors._

Ernest was from Liverpool. Maggie was from Soho, in London. They had met, however, in Europe, in the War, where Ernest did the things he’d written a book about and Maggie had driven bigwigs around and fixed their cars. They lived, now, in Southwark, which apparently was better than Soho, and which the book had made possible, and though Maggie had been let go from her job Ernest had a much better one and also a second book, he hoped. By this time he even looked hopeful, which made his face appear soft, almost delicate. War heroes, Pam had noticed, often looked that way.

Duncan appeared startled by something beyond Jerry’s shoulder. “Is that - after all the time I’ve spent working on him, he’d better not have signed with Unwin!” Jerry asked who had better not and Duncan waved in a beckoning way. “Famous bloke, if you fly in the right circles. I know there’s a book in him, been wearing him down since - Crowley! What’re you doing here? You haven’t gone and done the book behind my back?”

The man in the black suit, red tie, and sunglasses lounged into the space between Duncan and Jerry, the surface of the scotch in his glass remaining absolutely level while the rest of him bobbed like a canoe in the wash of a powerboat. “S’no book. Don’t read. Is this one of your publishing whatsits? No wonder the booze is so bad.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Gotta be somewhere.” He sipped his scotch, which smelled pretty good. The way he held his head might mean that he was scanning all their faces, but with the sunglasses one couldn’t be sure. _What_ was that thing by his ear? Duncan made introductions, taking particular pains to mention that Ernest had a book about his war experiences just out and the reception was very good, and to mention to Ernest and Jerry that Anthony J. Crowley could write a complementary book, if he cared to, about the situation on the home front, and could tell them some stories. Anthony J. Crowley smiled with one half of his mouth, shrugged, and said: “Talk to me again when the statutes of limitations have all expired and everything’s declassified, but I won’t be writing any books then, either. Can’t sit still that long.”

“So pace the room and dictate it, man! It’s not as hard as you think it is. Tell him, Ernest.”

Ernest opened his mouth, but shut it again sharply as a man in a blue pinstripe iteration of The Suit came up behind him and clapped him on the back, saying something incomprehensible. Maggie looked horrified. “How’d _you_ get in here?” Ernest demanded, his accent changing significantly.

The newcomer had either found the pay bar, or didn’t care how bad the drinks were. He seemed ecstatic to see Ernest, who looked apologetically at Duncan, who frowned. The stream of accent went by too quickly and thickly for Pam’s ear-in-training, except that the last part resolved itself more or less into “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your posh friends?”

Ernest tucked his chin lower and resumed his labor to render himself comprehensible. “Mr and Mrs North, Mr Crowley, this is my old mate Milo Trotter. The last of my old mates, from before the War.” The eyes begged for understanding. “The Norths are from America, Milo.”

“Yanks!” Milo beamed at them. “I _love_ Yanks! Lady Yanks specially, you don’t see them so often. Hi, gorgeous! You gonna publish Ernie’s book in America, then?”

Ernest abandoned all attempts to enunciate in his hurry to shush Milo and hustle him away, trailed anxiously by a grim-faced Maggie, who excused them with a few words and gritted teeth. “Poor things,” said Pam.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Duncan. “He’s practically moved in with them, and when he’s not cadging lodging he’s touching them for cash. Not a situation I want to be in the middle of, but Trotter doesn’t care what or who or when he interrupts. I’m not sure why Bell puts up with it. Can’t bear to cut off the last surviving friend of his youth, I suppose.”

“He should delegate,” said Pam. _“Maggie’d_ get rid of him in a heartbeat. Do you suppose he really drank enough of these cocktails to get drunk, or did he find the pay bar?”

Duncan sighed. “I expect he arrived drunk. There’s no pay bar.”

“I’m sure there is,” said Pam, “otherwise where did Anthony’s scotch come from?”

“This?” Anthony J. Crowley swirled the drink in his hand, elevating his eyebrows, while Jerry hung upon his words. “Somebody had a tray. Had to fight two editors and a publicist for it before it all vanished.”

“They carry neat scotch around at cocktail parties here?” This seemed eccentric even for the British, to Jerry; but maybe it was a desperate response to the realization that whoever was mixing barely knew what a martini was.

“Your friend had wine, too, on the mezzanine,” said Pam. “In a highball glass.” _You gave it to him_ , but she would only know that if she had been eavesdropping so she remembered in time not to say so.

“What friend? Oh, gosh, you’re the nap lady. Thought you looked familiar. Naw, don’t know that fellow from Adam. Could’ve brought in a bottle of wine in that coat of his for all I know.” He smiled at her with the other half of his mouth, clearly knowing that this wasn’t the sort of lie one called people on at cocktail parties. 

But why lie? Except, perhaps, to let Pam know he knew she’d been eavesdropping; but he couldn’t know that, not really. At the entrance to the ballroom, Milo Trotter was not eager to leave the party and someone was coming to assist the Bells; but Maggie hooked him by one arm and Ernest by the other and they got him out, with only a small disturbance. “Oh, I hope he doesn’t ruin their whole evening!”

“They’ll be lucky if the evening’s all he ruins,” said Crowley.

“You know him, then?” Duncan asked. 

Crowley shrugged. “Dozens of him, over the years.”

Then Wilson, an editor Pam and Jerry had met in New York right after the war, came by and introduced them to his boss, and groups reconfigured themselves, and Pam didn’t see either of the Bells anymore until she went into the ladies’ again to freshen up before dinner, and found Maggie sobbing and beating a subway tile wall with her fist. She tried to stop when she heard the door open, but she was too slow or Pam was too fast. “I feel a right fool,” Maggie said, smearing her makeup. “I’m not, usually, only this, this _week_ -“

“Some weeks are like that,” agreed Pam, getting tissue out of her purse. “Hold still, now, you’re making it worse.” She moved Maggie’s hands - square, callused hands, with short inexpertly painted nails - away from her face and dabbed efficiently at the wreckage. 

“Things ought to be going so well.” Maggie sniffed, submitting to expert assistance. “Only it’s not what I’m used to. S’not like the service, or good old Soho, and the job’s gone, and I want to get behind Ernie and the book stuff, only - I was never the girly type, and we were all mend-and-make do even before rationing, and these posh folks, they look at you - not _you_ , I don’t mean - I _know_ the dress is all wrong but I couldn’t make myself go into the right kind of store - still, I can’t believe I’m _crying_ about it!”

“It’s been an awful party,” said Pam, who didn’t believe for a minute she was crying about her dress; but it was always a good idea to take the chance to cry about several things at once, when they’d been piling on. “And I bet you didn’t eat lunch.”

Maggie turned a sniff into something like a giggle. “Wouldn’t’ve fit in my sister’s girdle if I had.”

“You’ll feel a lot better after you eat. Where’s your compact? Oh, this is a good color for you. Hold still.” Pam felt the girl relax as she repaired the damage. “I was wondering if you’d do me a favor? It’s kind of a big one.”

“What favor?”

“Jerry’s got a lot of people to see tomorrow, and I don’t know anybody. We made lists of the places we want to go to, so I’m supposed to go see my ones that Jerry doesn’t care about tomorrow, but I’m not very good with maps, or understanding English cabbies, and I want to get Jerry a new suit so I can find him, but I don’t even know where to shop. Could you take me around? If you’re free?”

“No plans,” said Maggie. “Just a spot of jobhunting and I’m sick of it. Nobody wants to hire women these days, not for the kinds of things I can do. I really _don’t_ have any posh clothes, though - this is the only dress I even own.”

“If you’re not embarrassed to be with a gawking tourist I won’t be embarrassed by anything you wear. You have the kind of figure that looks good in slacks. And it’d help me out a lot. There we are, good as new.”

“Thank you.” Maggie looked at herself in the mirror, and blinked a few times. “All right. Where should we meet up?”

“You’d better get me right from the hotel so I don’t have a chance to get lost.” Pam did her freshening up and told her what hotel and they set a time and went out, to find Jerry and Ernest standing among the wing chairs and the man in the light suit sitting in one with the _Times_ in his hands. They were all in a conversation that stopped when Maggie’s face lit up and she exclaimed: “Mr. Fell! What’re you doing here?” She went right up to him, as if he were her long lost aunt - no, uncle, of course, but it looked more like greeting an aunt than an uncle somehow.

“The _Times_ crossword, theoretically,” said Mr. Fell. “How are you, Maggie, dear?”

“You know this gent, Mags?” Ernest asked.

Maggie hesitated, only slightly, only long enough for Mr. Fell to step in and say: “Maggie used to deliver takeout to my bookshop on her bicycle. Until she went into the WAAFs. You must come to tea soon, dear, and bring your young man. You know where to find me. I haven’t changed a jot.”

“It was nice meeting you,” said Jerry. “Come on, Pam.”

They walked to the entrance with the Bells. “I didn’t think literary parties were so easy to crash,” said Ernest. 

“Booksellers get invited to literary parties,” said Jerry. “You’ll do well to cultivate any booksellers you know.”

“Not _that_ kind,” said Ernest darkly. “Not the kind that sells the books people buy in Soho.”

“Mr. Fell’s not like _that_ ,” said Maggie, in a tone that made all of them hold space in the conversation for her to say what he was like; but she didn’t. 

“I hope this doesn’t put you off literary parties entirely,” said Jerry, when it became clear that Pam had missed her cue to cover for Maggie, and Ernest was on the brink of something or other that didn’t need to happen in public. “They aren’t always this bad, and they’re seldom any worse. If you can find other authors to talk to you’ll be able to enjoy yourself.”

“The more things I do that publishers want me to do, the more I wonder what business I have calling myself an author at all,” said Ernest.

“All authors feel like that,” Jerry assured him. 

At the door they found a line of taxis with a mass of people dividing themselves into them. The Bells went off with Duncan and some more of his authors, and the Norths went off with an editor who had offered to feed them alongside his authors, all of whom wanted American editions, and they ate at a restaurant that might as well have been a banquet for all the flavor the food had. Jerry had to explain about lemons and martinis before they could get any, but at least they were more drinkable than the ones at the party. Everyone talked about shortages and books and the places that did or did not still exist in London, how nothing was the way it was Before the War and how were things in America. Then they went to a place where someone was sure the martinis would be better, and they weren’t. When it got late they shared another taxi, and the Norths were the first ones dropped off. Jerry unlocked the door to their room and opened it slowly, blocking the crack; then stopped and said: “Hang on, there’s no cat,” and opened it all the way.

“Do you think she’s sitting in front of the door at home waiting for us?” Pam went in.

“Probably not.” Jerry followed her, closing and locking the door behind them. “She’s fine. She’s probably under the sofa, but she’s fine.” He watched her put down her bag and hang her coat in the wardrobe, and handed her his own topcoat to hang up. “Are you sorry you came?”

“No, of course not,” said Pam. “My head hasn’t hurt for hours and I’m the right kind of tired now. And it doesn’t matter about you being in meetings tomorrow, because Maggie’s going to take me to see the things you don’t want to and get you a new suit.”

“I have suits,” said Jerry.

“You have the same suit everyone else does and I can’t find you,” Pam explained. “It’ll be worse in Frankfurt because I won’t be able to talk to anybody. Anyway she needs a break and maybe I can find out why Mr. Fell’s so worried about her.”

Jerry ran his right hand through his hair. “Pam.”

“If you’d leave your hair like that you wouldn’t need a suit,” said Pam. “And I’m _telling_ you, if you’ll stop interrupting.”

She told him about eavesdropping for accent practice as they got ready for bed. He only said “Pam” and ran his hand through his hair again once, and that was when she remarked on Mr. Fell not being a woman, which admittedly was a side issue. “What were the three of you talking about when we came out of the ladies’?”

“How Soho used to be a literary hub because authors need cheap rents,” said Jerry. “Mr. Fell is a chatty guy. Sucks you in. You can’t be sure it was Maggie and Ernest they were talking about when you eavesdropped.”

“She knew him, though, and how many young women married to war heroes who wrote books can there be at one party? Even these days. Anthony lying about knowing him makes it all even more mysterious.” Pam sat on the side of one bed, facing Jerry sitting on the other. “But I don’t really know that it’s related.”

“No, you don’t,” agreed Jerry. “And we’ll only be here a few days.”

“It must be serious, though, or she wouldn’t have been crying so hard in the ladies’. And they’re so sweet. Are you going to take their book?”

Jerry shrugged, and yawned. “I’m meeting Smythe for lunch tomorrow so he can give me an ARC. It sounds like something different, as war memoirs go. But you know, one of the advantages of taking editions from overseas is, that you don’t have to deal with the authors. The Bells are Smythe’s problem. Not ours. And Mr. Fell’s, I guess.”

“Duncan’s a bachelor,” Pam pointed out. “And Mr. Fell isn’t a woman, though I don’t know why not. I know it probably doesn’t matter, but it bothers me. In my head, it wasn’t even a question, I just heard them and he was the woman.”

Jerry yawned again. “Aren’t you tired? I know you didn’t sleep on the plane. I did, and I’m about to drop.”

“I seem to have gotten my second wind about the time the headache went away. But all right, I’ll think about it till I fall asleep and let you know in the morning.”

“Just don’t think out loud.”

“Oh, I’ve trained myself out of that. Mostly.”


	2. Thursday, 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pam has a nice lunch with Maggie and Mr. Fell. Jerry has an annoying lunch with two publishers and Mr. Crowley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ARC = Advance Reading Copy. This is essentially a bound galley with a little sales copy on it, for sharing around in the industry garnering reviews and interest in subsidiary rights such as movie options and foreign editions.

Maggie Bell seemed far more comfortable showing Pamela North around London than she had drinking bad cocktails. She had the figure for slacks. She knew how to stand in walking shoes, where she really hadn’t in high heels, and how to get around on the tube, and how many pounds or shillings were cheap or expensive in different situations, and where everything was, even with holes all over the landscape from the War still. All of which was just what Pam needed. They saw the things Jerry didn’t want to see, and bought enough postcards to send to everybody she knew in New York and a few in the Midwest. They couldn’t find a suit that would do at all for Jerry, but they did find a cocktail dress and shoes that were perfect for Maggie once Pam taught her the trick of walking in them. “They’re awfully dear,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the way the silvery skirt flared behind her. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Well, I don’t know how much money this is,” said Pam, “but the real question is, what will Ernest look like the first time he sees you in it? And what will he do about it?”

Maggie flushed, smiled, and smoothed the skirt with her strong square hands that had probably been reassuring to the generals being driven around war zones by them. “It’s well-made and should last a long time.”

“The style would be easy to vary, with a scarf here or a belt there,” said Pam. “You could make it last several years unless the silhouette changes drastically.”

So Maggie bought the dress, and the shoes, and as they left the store asked, in a hostessy voice because after all it was her city: “Where would you like to have lunch?”

“I don’t know anything about the restaurants here, except the one we went to last night was pretty bad,” said Pam. “We should go to your favorite place.”

Maggie looked uncertain. “My favorite isn’t very, well -“

“My favorite at home isn’t very, either,” said Pam, though she wasn’t sure whether Maggie might not think Charles was a little on the posh side. “There’s no point having a native guide if you don’t go to the places they like best.”

They took a taxi, because of the packages and the misty half-hearted rain, to a small dark place between two bombed-out lots with board fences around them, where Maggie looked around for an open table instead of waiting to be seated. Her face lit up. “Mr. Fell!”

Sure enough, there was Mr. Fell again, in what was clearly the best table in the house, by a bow window letting in an improbable amount of light for something they hadn’t been able to see through from the outside on a rainy day. He clapped his plump, exquisitely manicured hands together, beaming. “Oh, Maggie, how lovely! Won’t you and your friend join me?”

So they put their packages in the fourth seat at the table and sat with Mr. Fell, who wore the same shabby light suit he’d had on the night before. He and Maggie settled between them what Pam should eat, without reference to a menu, whereupon the waitress showed up and Mr. Fell ordered everything. Pam felt bad about that, because of the three of them she plainly had the most money, but once a man’s ordered for everybody there’s no getting him to split the check. He seemed so happy that she soon forgot all about it. The waitress smiled, the other customers smiled, the cook came out to tell Mr. Fell that somebody was doing _so much_ better; and the idea that he or anyone within ten yards of him had ever been worried or frightened about anything was preposterous.

He asked for, and was granted, glimpses of the dress and shoes, which he admired knowledgeably, opining that Maggie’s young man would not know what hit him and that the items would soon prove their worth at book parties. He invited Mrs. North to share her extensive experience of book parties. Before long she explained that London was incidental and they were on their way to the revived Frankfurt Book Fair, from which they didn’t know what to expect. “It’s an experiment, and there won’t be anything for me to do there,” she admitted. “But if Jerry’s airplane had fallen into the ocean alone I would never have forgiven myself. And then there’s the baby, which is ridiculous, honestly, nieces having babies. I mean, first they were babies, and then they were little girls, and then we had to watch out for sailors, and now one of them’s married a soldier and gone to Germany and had a great-niece and I won’t really believe it till I’ve seen it.”

She realized in the middle of saying this that Mr. Fell (and possibly even Maggie, though in general women were much better at understanding things than men) was going to look confused and possibly run his hand through his hair. She stopped talking to give him space to do this in. Instead, he chuckled. “I know, it’s absurd! A child asks to read _The Wizard of Oz_ ; I turn around and she’s a great girl bringing me baked goods on her bicycle; I turn around again and she’s haring all over Europe fixing cars while bombs rain down on her!”

“Oh, I never did,” protested Maggie. “The bombs were long gone before my generals went anywhere.”

“Are you calling your poor dear mother a liar, madam?” 

“I’m calling her a fussbudget!”

“It is the blight mothers are born for, as you’ll know yourself soon enough.”

A shadow passed over Maggie’s face, incongruous in the sparkle of Fellish good humor. “Maybe not.” She prodded the sausage on her plate with her knife. “I don’t know what Mum’s told you -?”

“I understand that - impediments - exist,” said Mr. Fell, the sparkle giving way to a warm upwelling of sympathy. “But I had understood an adoption was in the works?”

Maggie put the next bite of sausage into her mouth. 

“Adoptions aren’t as straightforward as people think,” said Pam. “At least, not in New York.”

The bite of sausage went down. “Not here, either. We’ve got interviews and people looking into backgrounds, and all, to get through.”

“How terrifying,” said Mr. Fell, in a voice like a pillow waiting for Maggie to fall into it. “But you shouldn’t have a thing to worry about. Look at yourselves, my dear! An employed war hero who is also an author? A healthy ex-WAAF with generals to vouch for her character - you _are_ using your generals as references, I hope? This is no time to be diffident about your connections.”

“Oh, I know,” said Maggie, a little too fast. “We’re putting our best foot forward and all. But, well, neither one of us, we’re not from what you’d call a good background.”

Mr. Fell tutted. “If anyone tries to tell you your mother is anything less than respectable, you send them to _me_!”

Maggie’s smiled flickered back on briefly. “Well, I will then! But - there’s things - Ernie’s had a _life_ , you know, and -“ She locked eyes with him - “if the wrong person says the wrong thing, it could all come crashing down. Couldn’t it?”

Pam looked from one to the other. Clearly, they understood each other at some level alien to her and not at all her business. But she remembered a hearty intrusive drunk, gritted teeth, and Duncan’s remarks about touching for cash, and her mind leaped to one of the ugliest, most frightening words she knew. “Do you mean Milo?”

Maggie’s eyes went very wide, then very narrow; then she ate a mouthful of what she’d told Pam were called “mushy peas.” Once she had chewed and swallowed and taken a sip of the dark drink in her glass, she said: “Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I daresay I’m worrying about nothing.”

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Fell. “You know you can always come to me.”

 _“I_ know I can. But Ernie’s a Scouser.”

“Your _husband_ will never be an outsider, my dear!”

“He wants to be, though. He doesn’t even want to see the old neighborhood. If he had his way, Mum’d be living with us in Southwark and we’d all forget everything and everybody about the bad old days.”

“Then want must be his master, I’m afraid. Whether your mother moves in with you or not, regardless of where you live, where you’ve been is part of who you are. Liverpool and Soho and the war and _all_ of it. Neither of you’d be who you are without them, and you’ll come a cropper if you try to get away from that, mark my words.”

Something hung in the air as they ate, Mr. Fell enjoying his food but also watching Maggie’s face. Maggie watched her plate. “What’s a Scouser?” Pam asked.

“Someone from Liverpool or Merseyside,” said Maggie. “That’s why Ernie talks so careful. You can tell a Scouser the minute they open their mouths if they don’t watch out. Not that there’s anything bad about it. Only Ernie didn’t come from the nice part of town, and he’d rather his tongue not drag him back there all the time. Let the dead bury their dead, he says.”

“But the dead can’t bury anybody,” said Pam. “They’re dead themselves.” Except for Milo; but she kept those words inside her head instead of letting them out. She did not want to say the ugly word, in Maggie’s favorite restaurant, in front of Mr. Fell. But she was afraid all conversational roads led there. “The dead just lie there, waiting for people to do things about them.”

Mr. Fell raised his eyebrows. “Do you meet a lot of dead people, in the publishing industry?”

“Not because of that,” said Pam, pouncing on a subject she usually preferred to avoid. “But yes. Sometimes I think it’s a curse. It’s mostly because of Bill, because he’s a homicide detective, but we wouldn’t have met him if I hadn’t found the body in the upstairs bathtub. Not our upstairs, the empty apartment. The landlady was going to let me have a party there, because there’d be more room, but somebody put a body in it and I never did. But at least we met Bill and Sergeant Mullins, and could tell Bill about the lobster tasting wrong so he could solve it. It was too late for the poor dead man then, of course. I’m making everything so much worse, aren’t I?”

“By no means,” said Mr. Fell, and she felt better at once. “But perhaps a more connected narrative would be more enlightening?”

She should have felt well and truly put into her place by this; but Mr. Fell smiled at her, Maggie was wide-eyed in a far more innocent way now, and she found herself on solid ground with this old story. It cleared the conversational hurdles, and Maggie could then talk about the war and the book, while Mr. Fell ordered desserts. 

They were almost ready to leave when Pam remembered what she had intended to ask Mr. Fell. “I need to find Jerry a suit that doesn’t look like everybody else’s,” she said. “So I can find him where I don’t know anybody. Do you happen to know where Mr. Crowley got that black one he was wearing last night?”

Mr. Fell dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “Who, my dear?”

“The other man on the mezzanine. With the sunglasses and the red tie and the black suit instead of charcoal.” Why was Maggie shaking her head?

“Oh, yes, I remember. I may have exchanged a few words with him, as one does at these things, but I’m afraid I don’t know him from Adam.” His eyes met hers, clear and blue and innocent. “The suit _was_ striking, though, wasn’t it? I expect he has a tailor.” The waitress brought him the check, and he began counting what seemed to Pam to be a lot of bills on top of it.

“We’d best be getting on, if you want to see the Tower,” said Maggie, standing up. “Thank you for lunch, Mr. Fell!”

“Thank you ladies so much for joining me! Have a lovely afternoon.”

Pam couldn’t do anything but thank him, too. Miraculously a taxi pulled up at the curb as soon as they stepped outside, so they got in and directed him to go to the Tower. Maggie clutched the dress package in her lap. Pam held the shoebox. “All right,” said Pam. “I can tell you know. Why don’t Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell admit to knowing each other from Adam?”

Maggie huffed a sigh. “You’re a curious person, aren’t you?”

“Well,” said Pam. “Not more than most people.”

“Most people who find bodies only find one, whether they’re friends with homicide policemen or not.”

“I don’t go looking for them!”

“Of course not. You’re ever so nice, but -“ Maggie hesitated, thinking something through. “I’m going to come out and say it, because you’re the sort that dancing around it makes you try harder. We _don’t_ talk about Mr. Fell. And we don’t even _think_ about Mr. Crowley. So you can ask questions till you’re blue in the face. There’s no answers to find. And that’s more than anybody else will tell you. You push it, and you’ll be lucky to get directions to the corner shop.”

Pam blinked at her. “Duncan said Mr. Crowley was famous. People must talk about him.”

Maggie shrugged. “In the right circles. We’re _not_. And even if we _were_ -“

Pam recognized the look on her face, then, and came up short, because she’d never seen it on a white face before. She associated it most with Martha, who was a good maid, but sometimes had to come in late or leave early or take an unexpected day off, and Pam would express concern and be told about a sick child or a visiting relative, and allowed to contribute cab fare or something; but other times concern only elicited this look and an “It’s fine, ma’am,” that meant, “You’re too white for this.” At which point she could only express readiness to help if called on, and take her superfluous whiteness out of Martha's way.

“I see,” said Pam. “Do Londoners ever go to the Tower, or is it like the Statue of Liberty, you only ever take visitors?”

Meanwhile, in an upscale pub in Mayfair, Gerald North met Duncan Smythe for lunch and to exchange ARCs. Wilson, with whom he’d been in a meeting and with whom he was still discussing the international appeal or lack thereof to be expected of various genres, came along for the ride. The taxi had to let them out in the middle of the drizzly street, because a prewar model, but smugly pristine, black car had somehow managed to take up every inch of drop-off space on the curb in front of it. “That can’t be legal,” said Jerry, stepping into a puddle, disguised by the shadow of the car’s fender, that came over his ankle.

“It’s not,” said Wilson. “Watch out inside. That’s Crowley’s monster. Things happen around him.”

Insofar as Jerry had formed expectations of Crowley, he would have expected something more along the lines of a luxury sedan or a sports car. He ducked under the awning at the entrance and pulled the door, with no result, as the awning leaked water down his neck. “I didn’t catch what it is Smythe thinks he’s famous for?”

Wilson shrugged and reached past him to push the door on the sign that said “Pull.” It opened. “Smythe did clean things in the war while I did muddy things. Which means I don’t ‘fly in the right circles,’ as he puts it. But I have the sense that Crowley was the get-you-what-you-want man. Black market, people smuggling, information brokering, that sort of thing. And I’m not convinced he ever stopped being that man.”

“I see,” said Jerry, whose business it wasn’t if the British harbored war profiteers. He stepped inside and to one side. “But can he get me a decent martini?” He braced himself against the wall to balance on one foot and empty the water out of the shoe on the other.

“Better settle for a g and t,” said Wilson, who had experienced what the Norths considered a decent martini during his stay in New York. “No reason to break your heart striving for what cannot be. I don’t believe there’s a cocktail shaker in this place.”

The sock, the shoe, and the foot inside were going to be cold and wet. There was no fighting it. Perhaps it was even an advantage, as the pub itself was so warm Jerry could tell recent arrivals by the steam rising from their hats to join the writhing smoke of pipes and cigarettes. Smythe sat in a booth, with a pint of something and an ARC in front of him. They joined him, ordered, traded damp ARCs around, talked about how some books were served better by smaller houses like North Books, Inc., and how maybe _Decorated_ , by Ernest Bell, was one of them. “The title might not fly in America for a war memoir,” Jerry said.

Smythe looked smug. “A lot depends on the cover. Read it and tell me what you think.”

Jerry said he would and ate sausage and potatoes, which the British called bangers and mash. The others ate dishes with less savory names. Smythe went to the bar and returned with a g and t, half-pint glasses of brown liquids, and Mr. Anthony J. Crowley, who did not so much walk between the tables as slither. “Look who I found!” Smythe beamed at them. “You don’t mind if he joins us for lunch, do you?” Wilson and North said that of course they didn’t.

Between dark panels, smoke, and steam, the pub was on the dim side, but Crowley wore sunglasses anyway. From this angle, Jerry could see that he had a black, twisty tattoo by his ear. The hell he did. Tattoos were for the arms of bored sailors and servicemen. Who, in what circumstances, tattooed their _head_? “I don’t do lunch,” said Crowley, “but I’ll drink along with anybody. If I’m not interrupting.”

“Not a bit,” said Smythe, delighted. “We’ve all had plenty of shop talk this morning, I’m sure.” He had to raise his voice a bit to be heard over two men at the bar who were disagreeing about something. Jerry’s foot squelched silently in its wet shoe. He acknowledged that he could use a break from shop talk. 

Crowley reached behind him without looking, grabbed an empty chair from a nearby table, pulled it up to the end of the booth, and straddled it with one elbow resting on the back, steadying a hand with a full pint of something darker than anyone else had. A group entered shaking their umbrellas and swearing about the improperly parked car out front. The people nearest the door objected to having water shaken over them. “Won’t be much of a break if Smythe gets on his hobby about people who aren’t writers writing books,” said Crowley.

“North’s the one we should be hounding about that,” said Wilson. “I mean, it’s inevitable. When I saw _My Favorite Murder_ on his list a few years back I thought he’d done it, but it turned out only to be a true crime anthology by other people.”

Jerry breathed exasperation into his g and t. Crowley’s eyebrows arched high above the sunglasses. “Fan of murders, are you, North?”

“Catching murderers,” Wilson assured him. “Got quite the name for it, in New York. On the side, like.”

“A publishing detective? How...literary.”

 _“No,_ ” said Jerry. “Bill Weigand is the detective. He’s good at his job. He has help from a huge network of policemen and forensic scientists and accountants and handwriting experts and I don’t even know who all. He doesn’t need help from Pam and me.”

“But he gets it,” said Wilson. “Heard all about it when I was in New York that time. You find bodies for him.”

Jerry wanted to express his feelings in a more forceful way than through an unraised but emphatic voice; but that would be no way to conduct international business. “We do not go looking for bodies. We would love to find fewer bodies. My wife found the one in the bathtub that time, and there was a homicide in her family, and one of my authors died on stage at a club event after I introduced him, and if nothing like that ever happens again we will live happily ever after.” Jerry steered, with the ease of long practice, away from the shoals of the cases with which they would have had no connection if Pam weren’t addicted to helping lame dogs over stiles. “And the thing about murder is, things happen. You can’t just opt out if the things that you happen to notice happening are things the cops might want to know about. Especially if one of those cops is having drinks with you that evening. Especially if the murderer might notice that you noticed and might decide two murders are as good as one.”

“Like the time your wife revealed the murderer on national radio while he was trying to kill her.” Wilson was enjoying this. Smythe was all agog. Crowley’s face was hard to read due to the sunglasses, but the flat black lenses pointed attentively toward Jerry’s face. 

Jerry wished them all to the bottom of the Atlantic. “It kept him from killing her, didn’t it?” He suppressed his inward shudders at the memory. “She can’t help it that she connects things murderers don’t want her to connect and has to survive it the best way she can.” Ideally she might, occasionally, give him a heads up that she was about to stick her neck out; but it would be disloyal to say so and anyhow she didn’t always know she was doing it till her neck was well and truly stuck. (He did not think about the times it was his own neck doing the sticking.)

“You can’t drop these hints and not give us details.” Smythe leaned across his plate, eyes bright and acquisitive.

So Jerry gave them a few details, illustrative of the usually oblique ways in which the Norths, primarily Pam, had been of assistance to Lt. (Acting Captain) William Weigand of Homicide West from time to time. “Obviously we don’t seek these situations out. We’d have to be crazy. It’s dangerous! Murderers kill people!”

“Murderers fascinate people,” Smythe pointed out. “As do the people who catch them. Both are good for a house’s bottom line.”

Jerry acknowledged the truth of this statement. “When Bill retires, there will be a book. It might be called _The Screwy Ones_. Because there’s no point writing about the boring ones. It will be written by William Weigand, and it will be dedicated to his wife Dorian, and my name will appear as publisher and editor, and Pam’s name will appear in the acknowledgments, and there will occasionally be references to members of the public with their names changed to protect the innocent who were of substantial assistance. Sometimes when Pam’s bored she makes up aliases for him to use. My favorite is Naoise Parker.”

Crowley had emptied his pint glass and fished a black cigarette case out of the breast pocket in the red lining of his black suit jacket. He offered long unfiltered cigarettes in charcoal-colored paper around. Jerry still had quite a bit of sausage and potato to go, and declined. “I see why the topic annoys you,” Crowley said as he lit his cigarette with a black lighter. “Hard to handle a wife who’s smarter than you.” 

Jerry decided he didn’t like Crowley. “What annoys me,” he said, jabbing a forkful of sausage, “is when people refuse to _recognize_ that Pam is smarter than me. They call it intuition like that’s not just a dismissive word for noticing things and drawing conclusions about them. Also known as intelligence! She’s smarter than _anybody_ else, except Bill. The thing is, Bill’s smart like a policeman. He takes in mountains of information and sorts it till everything’s all linked up nice and tight in his head so by the time he makes an arrest he can take you through it step by step. It’s necessary; but it can be slow. And _Pam_ is smart like _Pam_. She skips steps. She jumps sideways. People can’t follow her and she can’t slow herself down to their speed enough to catch them up, so they decide she’s scatterbrained and blunders into things instead of seeing what she looks at and making connections Bill can’t yet because of the piles of irrelevant details in the way. She doesn’t always draw the right conclusion, in fact sometimes she’s dead wrong, and she trusts people too much and takes them under her wing, which is going to get her _killed_ one of these days, but she jumps in directions that stir things up and clears things out. She saves a lot of time in the kinds of investigations that Sergeant Mullins calls ‘screwy.’ And that’s why Bill will talk to us, or talk to suspects in front of us, about things that maybe technically he probably shouldn’t. Because when he and Pam are clicking, the screwy ones come unscrewed.” 

Jerry ate mashed potato. It had gone cold. His foot had warmed up, but this was not as much of an improvement as would have been nice. A waiter busing the table nearest the door slipped on a puddle and dropped his tray, scattering broken glass and crockery and bits of drab British food. The charcoal gray cigarettes smelled expensive. Crowley, one half of his mouth turned slightly up and the other turned slightly down, tapped ash into the ash tray, with his left hand, which was ringless. If he’d had a ring, it would no doubt have been black. “I see,” he said. “Glad I don’t have a wife to go - clicking - with other blokes. But to each his own.”

If Smythe ever got a book out of this guy, its American edition would _not_ be published by North Books, Inc. Jerry looked him in the sunglasses. “Bill is our best friend. We introduced him to his wife. And you are not funny.”

Smythe and Wilson gazed into their cigarettes, their half-pints and plates being empty. The sunglasses stared back at Jerry. “No, I’m really not,” Crowley admitted, sounding like someone entirely different and much more congenial. “What I am, is getting the next round. Be right back.” He stood up, far more fluid and graceful than someone standing up from straddling a chair backwards should be, and sauntered vaguely toward the bar.

“Sorry about that,” said Smythe. “I’d meant to get him started talking, not you. When he’s on form he’s got great stories. But sometimes he’ll slam somebody out of the blue like that and you can’t predict it. Queer chap, I don’t deny it. A bit shady.”

“A bit,” sneered Wilson. “You wouldn’t introduce him to your mum.”

“He’s not exactly old school tie, no, but my mum knew his aunt, so yes, I would. She’s asked me to, but he won’t eat dinner with us, always has something else on. A real live wire, apparently, his aunt. Hung about with suffragists and flappers, always with cash in hand, trailing clouds of scandal. That’s another book I’d get if I could, but he won’t tell me if she’s even still alive, or where she retired to. She’s not in Mayfair anymore, I know that much. He does everything with those properties now.”

Jerry ate, sweating under his collar, wondering whether he’d have time to return to the hotel for dry socks before meeting the editor he hoped to interest in the ingenious books of an ingenious young lady who published with him. Crowley returned with a tray. “Here we go,” he said, distributing brimming glassware. “Stout, porter, bitters, and martini, very cold, very dry, with lemon peel.” He straddled the chair again. A new arrival tripped over the waiter cleaning up glass by the door.

Jerry stared at the martini in front of him. No olive lurked. Spots of oil from the lemon peel floated on the surface of the liquid. Cold frosted the glass. He took a sip.

It was perfect. 


	3. Thursday, 7:00 P.M. to 11:30 P.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pam and Jerry have supper, read ARCs, and go to bed.

Jerry, his entire afternoon delayed by the detour for fresh socks after lunch, got back to the hotel later than he’d planned, and spotted Pam in the bar, a slim woman with bright hair who was clearly too young to have a great-niece. The niece in Germany must be confused on that point. The bartender, looking bemused and interested, lit her cigarette. Jerry strode in from behind, kissed her, slid into the next seat, and put his stack of ARCs on the bar. The bartender turned away. Jerry might have imagined that he looked downcast. He was in the mood to imagine things like that. “Why are you drinking an old-fashioned?”

“The martinis were hopeless so I thought I’d drink one in honor of Sergeant Mullins. After all, there’s no point flying twenty hours over the ocean only to do everything the same way as usual.”

Jerry said he guessed not, and ordered a scotch. He was not ready to wash that perfect martini from lunch out of his mouth with a lesser effort. “Do you mind if we eat in the hotel tonight?”

“That’s fine,” said Pam. “I couldn’t find you a suit, so you’re off the hook for trying on tomorrow. Milo Trotter is blackmailing the Bells.”

Jerry ran his right hand through his hair. “Pam. Did Maggie tell you that?”

“Not in so many words.” Pam repeated the conversation about adoption and backgrounds and Ernie having led _a life_ that he preferred to leave in the past.

“You’re jumping,” said Jerry.

“Am I? What else could she have meant by ‘the wrong person says the wrong thing and it could all come crashing down?’”

“I don’t know, and you don’t either. It could mean - anything.” He’d think of something in a minute. “And it isn’t our business.”

“Jerry. What’s happened to every blackmailer we’ve ever met?”

“Every blackmailer we’ve ever met - that we know about - has been blackmailing a murderer. We could have met a lot of blackmailers who live long and peaceful lives because they stick to blackmailing adulterers, and not know a thing about it.” Pam stubbed out her cigarette. Waiting. “You were with her all day. You’ve met a lot of murderers. Does Maggie Bell seem like a murderer to you?”

“I don’t want her to be. And we don’t know what the blackmail is about. But it could prevent the adoption. It could saddle them with a permanent houseguest bleeding them dry. And who knows what else? If a woman feels like she’s protecting her children - if a man feels like he’s protecting his family - if they’ve already done something they’re too ashamed to remember - you can’t know what people’d do, can you?”

Jerry admitted that. He had to admit it, since Pam, whom he knew pretty well, he thought, most of the time, periodically took off doing some fool thing or other that he couldn’t have predicted. Therefore, he felt confident in his assertion that Pam didn’t know what Milo Trotter, to whom she had never even spoken, about whom she knew next to nothing, was doing, which meant she did not know that he was blackmailing the Bells. He thought this was a pretty comprehensive argument.

“It’s why Mr. Fell was frightened enough to crash the party,” Pam said, as if he had made no argument at all. 

“You don’t know he was frightened. He didn’t look frightened to me.”

“I heard him though. Mr. Crowley heard it, too. ‘What are you afraid of?’ He asked him that, before I pretended to wake up.”

Jerry glared at his (pretty good, in fact) scotch. “That’s what you think he said. You were listening because you needed practice understanding British accents.”

“And I got it! I understood almost everything everybody said to me today. And ‘scared’ is a universal accent.” She had him there, and knew it, but he did not say so, even though she left him space. “I wish I could be sure Mr. Fell was frightened in the right way.”

“So now there’s a right way to be frightened?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. Mr. Fell seems so nice. But there’s something - off - about him.”

Jerry thought back to the cheerful, very English man pretending to work the London _Times_ crossword and talking about Soho’s past as a literary hub. He hadn’t belonged at a publishing industry party, at least not in this decade, but that wouldn’t seem particularly “off” to Pam at lunch the next day. “You mean other than not being a woman?”

“Yes, other than that,” said Pam. “The thing is, I almost know why I made that mistake. It’s on the tip of my mind.”

“It’ll come to you. And it probably doesn’t have anything to do with the other thing. Crowley didn’t seem to know the Bells.”

“He knew Milo’s type, though, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he let Duncan call him over on purpose to meet the Bells, because Mr. Fell asked him to, to check things out discreetly. Why else would he lie about knowing him?”

This at least Jerry had a sound explanation for. “Because he’s a professional jerk. We ran into him at lunch today - Smythe and me and Wilson - and he’s a piece of work. I think he walks the line between government asset and crook, or maybe he only wants Smythe to think that. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw him. Maybe not that far.” He drank. “Though he does know what a martini should be, which surprised me. But he must’ve learned it from Wilson. Sometime. For some reason.” He didn’t like that the only satisfactory drink he’d had since leaving New York had been supplied by a man who’d suggested Bill and Pam might ever click in a wrong way. If the drink had been meant as an apology, Jerry didn’t accept it as such. He might accept a second one, though.

“Why shouldn’t he care about martinis? That ties in with Mr. Fell being off, though. Because I asked Mr. Fell if he knew where Mr. Crowley got his suits, and he told the same lie - that they didn’t know each other from Adam. Why Adam, I wonder? When I tried to ask Maggie afterward she said nobody talks about Mr. Fell and nobody even _thinks_ about Mr. Crowley. So I had to drop it.”

“Oh,” said Jerry. “That sounds like - hell.”

“Yes,” said Pam. “If Mr. Fell knows Milo’s blackmailing them, he might not be afraid of the same thing I am. He might be afraid of the same thing they are.”

“He might. No. No, he won’t. Because Ernest is the one Trotter knows something about. Has to be. The last of his old mates, and they had the same accent when Ernest stopped working on it.”

“Scouser,” said Pam, pleased with herself.

Jerry was pleased with her pleasure. “And I swear Ernest didn’t know Mr. Fell when we got to talking to him last night waiting for you two to come out of the ladies’.”

Pam looked more cheerful. “Because Maggie’s from Soho, and Ernest and Milo are from Liverpool - right. But where’s Mr. Crowley from?”

“Mayfair, I guess. Of course, if he is what he presents himself as - whatever that is - “

“There’s no telling.”

“There isn’t. Either way. Look, Pam. Please. We’ll only be here two more days. The things you’ve noticed could be perfectly harmless. Or they could be organized crime, or spies, and more dangerous than anything you’ve ever launched yourself into the middle of. I know you look at the Bells and see a couple of kids - all right, I do, too, but all the same they’re both adults and war veterans. They don’t need you to save them. Promise me you won’t try.”

Pam pushed aside her drink. “You know, I don’t think I like old fashioneds. Even without the fruit salad.”

“Let’s get supper and call it a day,” suggested Jerry, resolving to stick to her like glue till they left the country. “I have a lot of ARCs to get through.”

“And I have postcards to send. All right.”

So they went into the dining room, where they were seated in a draft. The hotel had a lot of drafts and somebody had to sit in them sometime. As they waited for their order and a couple of g and ts, Jerry said, a little against his will: “Do you ever - does it ever - “

Pam looked at him with her head on one side. “What?”

“I like having a wife who’s smarter than me.” Jerry crossed the table with his hand. “But, I wonder if maybe it bothers you? Sometimes?”

“Why, Jerry!” Her hand met his across the table. “What on - ? You always balance your checkbook on the first try and then you fix mine! If eyes are blue on page ten and brown on page three hundred you always catch it. You know all kinds of things, and don’t tell me that’s from being a publisher because most of them don’t read what they publish and you know it.”

His right hand being occupied, Jerry ran his left hand through his hair. “I can’t keep up with you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m smarter! I’m wrong as often as I’m right. And you always catch up eventually.”

“Not as fast as Bill does.”

“Oh, Bill. He always has more information than either of us, that’s all. What gave you such a silly idea?”

It _was_ a silly idea. Not that she was smarter; but that she would mind. He knew that; he’d known that the whole time the idea’d nagged at him that afternoon. “It’s not important. Only I remembered when Bill had that crush on you and -“

Pam laughed, loud and clear. The lady at the next table looked over and screwed her face up in disapproval, but Pam didn’t notice and Jerry didn’t call attention to it. The old bat had probably never laughed like that in her life. “You’re so sweet! Bill never had a crush on me!”

“Not once Dorian came along,” said Jerry. “But before that -“

“I know when someone has a crush on me, all right? He didn’t.”

Normally, Jerry gave way to her on these matters. She did emotions and he did grammar and arithmetic. But this time he shook his head. “I used to catch him looking -“

“So did I, but he didn’t have a crush on _me_! He had one on _us_.”

Jerry blinked at her. “That’s not how - what?”

Pam gestured inclusively at the space between them, at their touching hands. “He was a bachelor and thought he was fine, but then he got to know us. And all _he_ had was Mullins. So he started realizing that he was ready for that. For this. Oh, thank you.” The waiter brought the g and ts and assured them dinner would be right out. They ended the hand rendezvous on the table in order to sip them. They weren’t martinis, but they would do. “That’s why I invited him to the lake that weekend.”

“No, I invited him.” Pam gave him a pitying look. He tried to refuse it. “No, I’m sure I invited him.”

“You said the words,” said Pam. “I was the one who told you it’d be nice for him to get out of town for once. I knew who’d be there that weekend.”

Jerry thumbed through his brain for decade-old memories. “Are you saying you picked out Dorian for him? She hated policemen.”

“I didn’t know it would be Dorian. There were quite a few single women at the lake that summer. He was bound to like one of them. I’ve always been thankful he didn’t have time to like the one that got murdered. But once I saw him see her, then I knew it would be Dorian.”

“Well,” said Jerry. “That’s good, then.” 

Their meals arrived. They were better than Jerry’s lunch, but not as good as Pam’s. They ate, and talked about Jerry’s meetings, and how to manage all they wanted to do the next day and get to the theater they had tickets for on time, given that taxi service seemed to be patchy. They lingered over dessert, but still caught the elevator - excuse them, the lift - before the operator set it to automatic for the night. 

Back in their catless room, Jerry sprawled on his bed to read ARCs. Pam sat in a Windsor chair and a draft at the secretary in the corner by the window, writing postcards. The Weigands, of course, and other friends; Jerry’s office; the aunts, some cousins, her sister, the unmarried niece; Martha, who was taking advantage of their trip to visit her sister in New Jersey and would probably be surprised to get a postcard. Pam was making circles in the air with the tip of the pen, trying to think of a tactful way to remind Dorian’s friend of the special needs of cats named Martini, when Jerry laughed. Out loud. “What?” Pam asked, looking over her shoulder. All ARCs look alike, except for color; this one was dark red.

“Bell’s book,” said Jerry. “Decorations.”

“I thought it was a war memoir.”

“It is.” Jerry, who never read out from submissions, read out a paragraph about military precision and recruits with nonstandard feet. Pam laughed, too. He returned to reading, and she to postcards, until he laughed again, and then in the next moment made a sudden, sharp, wordless sound. Pam turned around again. “S’okay,” he said. “Just - the war part started with a jolt.”

“You’re taking it, aren’t you?”

Jerry waved a noncommital hand. “I might.”

He’s taking it, Pam thought, and started putting stamps onto postcards. She took them out to the mail chute, so as not to forget them in the morning, then got ready for bed before looking for something readable in the stack of ARCs. The room was not as warm as might have been nice, so she got into bed with her robe on to sit up reading about bright young things in a dim old postwar world. Jerry laughed again and read out another bit; then a few pages later hissed, as if in pain. The bright young things turned out to be fairly stupid, so she tried another ARC, with cats in it. She was wishing for more cats and less phonetic dialog when Jerry said: “Hell.”

“Hell, what, dear?”

Jerry stared at the page. “It doesn’t mean anything. I’m tired.”

“Read it out,” said Pam.

“All right. So. Bell’s found out that he’s gotten another medal, and the guy that was with him on the action, that he thought of himself as the backup guy for, didn’t. Bell killed six of the enemy in, well, an unusually unpleasant way, while the other guy got about twenty kids out of a building right before the Germans blew it up. French kids. There was a strategic - it doesn’t matter. This is Bell thinking about it: _So there it was, then. I killed six people horribly, and that was a good thing. Harvey risked his neck and wrecked his shoulder to save twenty kids, and that wasn’t worthy of note. All right. It’s a war. Everybody’s doing things and you can’t give ‘em all medals. None of it’s fun. It has to be done. If Harvey’d done what he’d done at home he’d get newspapers and grateful mums calling him a hero and if I’d done what I did, I’d have an appointment with the hangman and all England howling for my blood. But the blokes that decide who gets the bits of metal and colored ribbon decided they’d rather give them to me than to Harvey. Because he only saved kids and I made Germans suffer before they died. Because I had to. Because necessity makes it a good thing to do, I guess. And that’s the world I live in now, where if you have to do something evil badly enough, it stops being evil.”_

“Oof,” said Pam.

“That was in wartime, though,” said Jerry. “Everything gets turned inside out, in wartime.”

“It does,” said Pam. “And then we all go right back to where we were before the war, don’t we? Like it never happened. All the damned spots wash right out.”

Jerry turned down the corner of a page, because it was only an ARC and he didn’t have any old envelopes or receipts to use as bookmarks in the hotel room, and set the ARC on the table between the beds. “I want the book,” he said. “All right? We could sell the hell out of it. Even if we couldn’t, I’d want it, because it’s that good. Bell’s got - he sucks you in, you’re going down the road laughing with him and then suddenly the war comes in like a tire iron to the side of your head. Which is a strange recommendation for a book.”

“That’s literature for you,” said Pam.

“I want this book and I want to see the next one, see if he can keep it up, what else he can do. But I don’t want to ride to the top of the bestseller list on a wave of curiosity about the book the murderer wrote. Or the murderer’s husband. I’ve published a victim who had it coming. That’s bad enough. I don’t want to publish a murderer, too.”

“We don’t know either of them will kill Milo,” said Pam. “I’m jumping. Maybe I’m jumping the wrong direction. Maybe there’s no blackmail. No reason for anybody to murder anybody. Maybe, even with a reason, it won’t happen.” She set the book with the cats next to the telephone on the table between them.

“I’m cold,” said Jerry. “They keep the rooms too cold. It gets colder in New York but at least when you come inside you can warm up and still breathe. These buildings, if they’re warm they’re stifling and if they’re cold they’re damp.”

“I’m cold too,” said Pam. “Scoot over.”

Jerry scooted over. Pam turned off the light and crawled in beside him. They warmed each other up.


	4. Friday, 9:00 A.M. to Saturday, 2:00 A.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pam and Jerry try to just be tourists, and wander into realm a little out of step with their familiar world.  
> Pam jumps, and sticks the landing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some outright homophobic slurs from secondary characters, here, but more importantly, Pam and Jerry are performing a mental and linguistic dance in which good impulses and intentions struggle to engage with the ignorance inherent in their privilege. All privileged people who are not monsters do this when drawn out of their comfort zone. I've done it myself. I call it "singing the Middle Class Liberal Well-Intentioned Blues," after the National Lampoon song, and the trick is to recognize that it is not an important discomfort in the context of the issues you're trying to grapple with. You'll never grapple with the issues till you recognize that they're not about you and your precious feelings.

The day was, by the standards of England in autumn, a nice one. The Norths, aware that they had never seen London before and might never see London again, lay themselves out to be tourists. If Pam had bought a postcard of it, and she hadn’t seen it with Maggie the previous day, they went and looked at it. “To keep me honest,” Pam said. They followed the latest guidebook published by one of the companies whose representatives Jerry had talked to the day before. When they got lost they stood on streetcorners turning in circles with a map in their hands until a Londoner stopped to set them straight. They browsed bookstores. They did not talk about murders or blackmail or even American editions, and Jerry saw to it that none of their routes passed through Soho. 

Pam declared that they had been in England for three days and still hadn’t had a proper tea, so they found a warm and cozy looking tea shop and explained their problem to the waitress, who promised to take care of them, and did. They ate crumpets, and sandwiches, and scones with jam and cream (their waitress and another waitress disputed whether the jam went on them first or the cream did; so Jerry put the jam first and Pam put the cream first and it didn’t seem to them to make any real difference), and a pot of tea big enough that they were able to experiment with milk and sugar lumps multiple times. “It’ll never replace cocktails,” said Pam, so that only Jerry could hear; “but its fun to do once. And if we eat all this we won’t be hungry in the middle of the play.”

Full of sugar and goodwill, they were trying to figure out how the bills in their billfolds should be translated into the figures on the check and the substantial tip the waitress deserved for dealing with their American ignorance, when the bell over the door tinkled, the room brightened, and the waitress exclaimed: “Mr. Fell! Good afternoon!” 

Pam looked up.

“Good afternoon, Hortense.” Mr. Fell beamed at the waitress. “You’re looking very well today! Did your Clara get the part?”

“Yes! We’re so excited! Daphne’s pulling some scones out of the oven now, so you sit yourself down and I’ll go make you a nice fresh pot to go with them.”

“Goodness,” murmured Pam. “Does he spend _all_ his time making friends with waitresses? When does he sell books?”

She was sure she didn’t say it loudly enough to be heard, so it could only have been coincidence that Mr. Fell saw them at that moment. “Mr. and Mrs. North! Fancy running into you again! You’ll think London’s a village if you keep meeting the same people over and over. Are you enjoying yourselves?”

“Yes, we are,” said Pam, “only the money is confusing.”

“I think we’ve got it,” said Jerry, by “we” meaning himself. He knew as well as she did that Pam wasn’t trying, and that it wouldn’t have done her any good if she had. “But I’m not quite sure about the tip.”

Mr. Fell came over, with quick brisk movements and cheery crinkles around his eyes, as if helping tourists sort out currency were a treat he couldn’t pass up. Pam didn’t follow what happened at all, but in the end Jerry was satisfied that he wasn’t tipping either stingily or ridiculously, and that he understood his change.

They were at the door putting their topcoats and hats back on, and Mr. Fell was fussily settling himself at a table by a window when a huge black pre-war car, shining like rain puddles under streetlights, roared to a stop with one wheel on the pavement directly athwart the door. To Pam, who wasn’t used to the mirrored way the British drive and had been looking both ways backwards for two days, it appeared to have driven itself; but almost immediately the wrong door slammed and a tall woman sashayed around the car into the tea shop, all long limbs, black skirt, and violently red hair. Jerry held the door for her, and she probably smiled at him, but her eyes were covered by opaque sunglasses, so possibly she only smiled. “Goodness,” said Pam, stepping outside. “She drove like that? In this light?”

Jerry pulled the door shut after them and stared through the window. “That’s Crowley.”

“What?”

Inside, the redheaded woman slid into an inaccessible-looking chair on Mr. Fell’s left to sprawl with her elbows on the table, a charcoal-colored cigarette appearing in her hand. Jerry said: “Crowley has a tattoo by his ear, of all places. So does she. Same one. And that’s his car.”

The tea shop lights were bright enough to show a twisty black snake motif peeking out at Mr. Fell below the earpiece of the glasses, where Pam had noticed but not identified a dark mark during her brief acquaintance with Anthony J. Crowley at the cocktail party. Mr. Fell leaned forward with a lighter, pursing his lips in mock disapproval as his eyes danced with laughter and - “Oh,” said Pam, and jumped. 

“She...could be Crowley’s sister,” said Jerry, without conviction. “They could have dared each other? When they were younger? To get tattooed in a stupid place?”

Pam tugged Jerry’s arm. “We need a taxi.”

They got one and told the driver to go to the theater. Pam caught her breath. “Well, _I_ feel stupid. Jerry. _That’s_ what Milo’s blackmailing them about! _Ernest’s a woman!”_

Jerry’s right hand reached for his hair, and found hat instead. “Pam. What? The hell?”

“And us from Greenwich Village,” said Pam, disgusted with herself. “Once you know _that,_ everything falls into place! It’s perfectly simple. And - oh dear - perfectly unsolvable, too. The poor things!”

“You’ll have to walk me through this,” said Jerry. “We’re starting with Crowley. Because that was Crowley. Dressed as a woman. Or, Miss Crowley, dressed as a man before - no, because he had an Adam’s apple. And five o’clock shadow.”

“Right,” said Pam. “And that’s what was on the tip of my mind! Oh! _How_ did I not know that right away? I’m slipping.”

Jerry closed his eyes. “Walk, not skip.”

Pam sighed, thinking that being a tourist must have tired Jerry out, for him to be so slow. “Because of how he talked to him, of course! The accents distracted me, but they talked like a couple. They _are_ a couple - anybody could see that who bothered to look. Or listen! Men don’t talk to other men that way - in those tones of voice - they don’t call each other _angel_ \- unless -“

The taxi driver coughed loudly. “‘Scuse me, but for all you know I’m a nark. What did these ponces ever do to you?”

“Oh,” said Pam. “Oh, dear.”

“Even if you were, you wouldn’t go to the police with something like this,” Jerry protested. “Not something so small. The police wouldn’t care. Except as part of something larger. Would they?”

“You can’t tell, can you? A bunch of easy collars, poofters are, on a slow night. They find a bloke like me that gets around, they ask questions, want to know what you’ve heard. Me, I’m a bit hard of hearing, but not everybody is. You want to be careful, in a strange place.”

“Gotcha. We don’t want to get anybody into trouble.”

“Right you are. Plenty of trouble to go round without making more, that’s what I say.”

“How much trouble would it be?” Pam asked. “Are we talking hard labor, like Oscar Wilde, or -?”

“Trouble enough. Especially once the wrong coppers know a few faces. Innit like that in America?”

“Oh, it’s like that,” said Jerry; glad, as he was often glad, that Bill was in Homicide and not Vice.

They were early at the theater, got drinks at the bar, and found a quiet corner. “All right,” said Jerry, standing between Pam and the crowd. “Nobody talks about Fell or thinks about Crowley, not because they’re organized crime or spies, though they might be, but because they’re a couple. Or - they’re both That Way and they’re friends. Because - come on, Pam, _those_ two? Mr. Sunshine and the Shady Jerk?”

“If Bill lit my cigarette with that expression on his face, would you be okay with it? Because I wouldn’t.”

“All right,” said Jerry. “You’re right. Crowley’s whole gig - Smythe and Wilson don’t have it pinned down. People smuggling could mean green card marriages, or whatever they’re called here. Often as not those are beards. Everybody knows it, nobody says it. There’s probably dozens of ways - folks like that - need to skate close to the edge of the law that wouldn’t even occur to us. Maggie might not realize how sinister it sounded when she wouldn’t talk about them. To her it might only be manners, not making trouble for her mother’s neighbors. But how do you get from that to -?”

“Dressing,” said Pam. “Cross-dressing. If you’re trying to pass you’d stress over details. Like, Adam’s apples. That’s why Ernest tucks his chin down - to cover up the lack of one. He has the Scouser accent that explains talking so slowly and carefully, but he also doesn’t want his voice to go up too high. He’s a bit on the short side but when he’s anxious he stoops, like a teen girl shielding her bust. He’s well into his twenties but cocktail hour and no stubble, Jerry? None at all?”

“He was in the Army, for Pete’s sake,” Jerry objected.

“At no point in the book does any part of his uniform fit right. Besides, it’s been done. What about that book you put out awhile back? That woman in the Revolution?” 

“They didn’t have physicals during the Revolution.”

“Milo’s the same height as Ernest. Same coloration. What if he took Ernest’s physical for him?”

“You’re jumping.”

“Yes, but I’m right! Think about it! You know how - those apartments on the corner back home - they, they cluster -“

“We don’t _know_ that every tenant in the house on the corner is, is - we don’t know that _any_ of them are. They’re an eccentric bunch, but we don’t _know._ ”

“Sure we don’t. Like I still _didn’t know_ once I saw Mr. Fell wasn’t a woman. Give me a cigarette, dear, please? Thanks. We don’t _wan_ t to know, do we? We’re law-abiding but sometimes the law’s ridiculous. So we tell ourselves they could have lots of reasons to call the landlord Aunt Mary and it’s perfectly normal for them to have better hair than me.“

“Nobody has better hair than you. Fine, they cluster, what about it? Of course they cluster. They need to protect each other, and to, to, to pair up.”

“Mr. Fell owns a bookshop in Soho. Maggie lived in Soho. She prefers slacks, she fixes cars, she wears her hair and nails short, Mr. Crowley was skeptical of her having a husband. Maybe she knows Mr. Fell because she had to start clustering young. Maybe the mum Maggie and Mr. Fell talk about is more like Aunt Mary the Landlord.”

“Or maybe she’s Maggie’s mother.”

“Maybe. But even with that, it all fits together. It works. You remember that story? About Eisenhower and the lesbians?”

“How he got orders to clear all the lesbians out of his staff, but conveniently lost them when he found out he’d have no staff and an empty motor pool? Yeah. Okay, it could be that way. Maggie could be that way too. And if she is -”

“If she is, and Ernest is a, was Ernestine, that’s a _very good_ reason to want to leave the past in the dust, but _also_ not to tell Milo to take a hike when they obviously don’t want him around. Because Milo knew Ernestine. And if Milo tells the wrong person - that’s it for them. Not just jail time. No marriage. No adoptions. No job, probably. Maybe - would they take the medals away? Is there anything like the GI Bill, that they could lose? What about the book? What would Smythe do?”

“Hell if I know,“ said Jerry. _“Hell_ if I know.”

They finished their cigarettes and drinks. The house doors opened. They found their seats and watched the play. Pam’s accent training failed her, in the face of British stage English and theater acoustics, and she found the plot hard to follow. Poor Maggie and Ernest! And Pam couldn’t help. She’d be gone by tomorrow night, while Milo had the rest of his life to keep the pressure on till one of them broke and he became yet another murdered blackmailer. Even if this happened in New York, Pam wouldn’t be able to help, because - how else could he be gotten out of their hair? This wasn’t the sort of thing to say “Publish and be damned” about. Not something that would become simple and irrelevant if they’d only tell Bill. She saw no way out. She couldn’t even express sympathy, because that would mean saying things that should not be said out loud. Not by her. _That_ was what Maggie’s face had meant yesterday; not, this time, that Pam was too white, but that she was too heterosexual.

I’m glad they’re not in New York, Pam thought as everyone around her laughed at a big reveal on stage that Pam didn’t see the point of because she didn’t understand one word in three. I’d have to be on Bill’s side and I’d have to tell him and it would be like, like sending someone to jail, or the chair even, for liking dogs instead of cats. Even though by that time it would be for murder. Because what else _could_ they do? With the law standing ready to destroy their lives for liking dogs? _If you have to do something evil badly enough, it stops being evil_ , Ernest had written; and so, almost certainly, someday, Ernest would do, and Maggie would cover for him. Her. Anyhow.

Only if I’m right, thought Pam. But she couldn’t convince herself she wasn’t, so that didn’t help.

The coat check girl tried to give them the wrong coats and hats, and to give theirs to someone else. By the time they got everything onto the person it belonged to, the flocks of post-show taxis had dispersed, and no more seemed to be coming. They walked in the direction they were reasonably certain the hotel lay. The streetlights were bright, they were not the only people out, and now that the theaters had emptied they’d have better luck where there were clubs and restaurants. Jerry tried to explain the play’s plot, hindered by Pam’s skepticism that he’d understood any more of it than she had.

A fog rose. Still no taxis. They studied their map and thought they could find an underground station, but after several minutes of walking and squinting at street signs they didn’t. They walked alone down (or up? Did up and down, those bedrock Manhattan directions, mean anything in London?) a narrow street where the lamps sputtered, trash lay in sodden heaps, and all sounds were distant and distorted, except for three sets of footsteps.

“Someone’s following us,” said Pam.

“You’re imagining it,” said Jerry, his grip on her arm tightening. They walked faster. The third set of footsteps walked faster, too. “We took a wrong turn somewhere but look, there’s plenty of light up ahead. Lots of neon flashing, see? There’ll be taxis.”

A fourth set of footsteps fell in with the footsteps behind them. Steady, purposeful, matched footsteps. I’m imagining things, thought Pam, but if they’re walking together shouldn’t they talk to each other? Neon flashed on and reflected off of fog. They passed the open door of a club, hesitated, and passed on. It did not smell like a good place to ask directions. A too-tall woman, maybe, in a too-small dress and a ratty fur appeared out of the fog in front of them and vanished before Pam made up her mind to speak. She heard traffic, everywhere but here.

“Finally,” said Jerry, stepping onto a street where neon turned the fog pink and blue. A car swished by, from fog into fog. A man with a woman on each arm stumbled past, their laughter distorted. 

“I don’t like being a tourist,” said Pam. “If this happened to us in New York, I wouldn’t be frightened at all.”

“It wouldn’t happen to us in New York,” said Jerry. “We know New York. Look, there’s a taxi. We’re fine. We’ll be fine.” He stepped forward, raising the Pamless arm; but the taxi passed by unheeding. Two sets of footsteps caught up with them, flanking them. They were perfectly ordinary hulking men with perfectly ordinary bulky jackets that could easily hide any number of perfectly ordinary guns or knives and whose faces only looked dim and sinister because they were half-hidden by fog and scarves and the low brims of hats.

“Lostrya?” The one next to Pam said.

“We’re fine,” said Jerry. “We only need a taxi stand.”

The one next to him nodded his head away from the lights. “Me mate’s gotta taxi, ridonere.”

“Sorry?” Jerry tucked his arm closer to his side, so that the man couldn’t grab it, as he seemed inclined to do. 

Ahead, through the fog, shone golden safety. Pam jumped, without knowing she jumped. “There!” She exclaimed, as one benighted on a threatening sea beholds harbor lights. “Jerry, come on!” She hurried, pulling him after her, toward many-paned windows casting yellow squares across dirty sidewalks. The fog-swirled headlamps of a passing car, with giggling young people hanging out the windows, brought the inscription “A.Z. Fell & Co., Est. 1800” out of the darkness above the door, and immediately plunged it back.

“Pam - what -“ Jerry’s protests failed him as she sprinted up the steps and yanked the door open. A bell rang merrily. The door closed behind them, shutting out fog and noise, shutting them in with Tchaikovsky’s _Swan Lake_ and warm dry security and books. “We’re closed,” said a voice from the back, whence came also the music and the golden light. Jerry looked over his shoulder, and saw a woman not at all dressed for the weather cross the corner in front of the two men who had followed them, shaking her head; saw them falter and back away. Only then did he take the time to look at the place they had entered. “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

A very old bookstore, full of very old books; on every surface, nearly hiding the brass cash register, packed on shelves extending overhead to a mezzanine and a dimly-seen domed skylight that should not have survived the Blitz. A cozy aroma of dust and vanilla and wood polish with a sad undertone of mold. A round and fluffy silhouette standing in the doorway to the back room. “It’s us again, Mr. Fell,” said Pam. “We’re not following you, I promise!”

“Gracious,” said Mr. Fell, coming onto the sales floor and into focus. He had switched out his pale coat for a similarly pale cardigan, and his thumb held his place in a red clothbound copy of _The Man Who Was Thursday_. “Not that you aren’t entirely welcome, my dears, but aren’t you a little out of your way?” He walked past them, peered out through the glass of the door, nodded at the passing streetwalker, pulled the blind, shot the bolt. 

“We got lost,” said Jerry. “If you could point us at a taxi stand we’ll get out of your hair.”

The leading edge of the back room’s glow lit Mr. Fell’s merry round face, his eyes unexpectedly shrewd behind wire-rimmed reading glasses. Jerry felt, momentarily, that he had never been looked at so thoroughly before; that Mr. Fell saw things Jerry did not want him to see, but that this was all right; that as long as Mr. Fell saw them, he and, more importantly, Pam were perfectly safe.

“Oh, that won’t do at all,” Mr. Fell said. “You’ve had a fright. I understand New Yorkers have nerves of steel, generally, but the element of strangeness makes a huge difference, I’ve always found. No, I’ll call someone who can take you straight to your next port of call, and while you wait you can catch your breaths and have a spot of tea. Or, coffee, I suppose? I don’t often entertain Americans but I have an, an associate who partakes occasionally and I like to have some on hand. Right through here, let me take your coats - oh, mind your - I should finish putting away those commentaries on St. John, they are so awkward.”

“Coffee would be nice,” said Pam, as she and Jerry found themselves settled side by side on a sofa from a bygone era. The back room, tucked under the mezzanine, was crowded with desks and cabinets and tables holding more books. Complex layers of tobacco joined the other smells. Tchaikovsky played on a gramophone with a giant bell, such as she remembered from her youth. “But you don’t need to go to any trouble.”

“No trouble at all, my dear, I assure you. You never can tell who might drop by, so I tend to keep some water hot.” Mr. Fell replaced his thumb with an embroidered bookmark in _The Man Who Was Thursday_ and busied himself at a sink and hot plate at the rear of the space. The comforting aroma and sound of perking coffee joined the other comforts of the space in an astonishingly short period of time. “There, and while that’s brewing I’ll ring up Artie and we’ll have you all taken care of.” He moved a pile of what looked to Jerry like ancient bound galleys and assorted theater programs to reveal a telephone no more than ten or so years old. Surprising, given all the signs of one who never replaced anything that still functioned; but perhaps he’d never bothered to get one installed until the war made communication an urgent matter.

Not that Jerry could ponder such questions in the face of so many books. One enters the book industry for a reason, after all, and even to an up-to-date small publisher with a healthy focus on the bottom line, marketability, and getting reviewed in the right places, the allure of mysterious uneven stacks of solid bindings and old paper is undeniable. Mr. Fell seemed to have quite a line in Bibles of all sizes and languages, which surprised Mr. North in light of the Crowley business; except, now he thought about it, what did one thing have to do with the other? He had stacks of books by and about Nostradamus, Mother Shipton, St. John of Patmos, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, and Sappho; _Psychopathia Sexualis_ ; and a glass-fronted cabinet into which Jerry longed to peer, the better to identify the ponderous tomes (some apparently studded with gems) and stacked scrolls (scrolls!?) within. The most recent book in the place seemed to be _Maskelyne’s Book of Magic,_ tucked carelessly into a top hat on the desk. 

Mr. Fell contacted Artie, asked about his arthritis and his pigeons, and arranged for him to dispatch a taxi. Jerry tried to reconcile the books, the fussiness, the classical and Biblical themes of the knickknacks crowded in among the books, with the neon and disreputable-looking people in the streets around them, with the friendly nod at the streetwalker. He wondered whether Crowley lurked among the shelves, or roamed neon and fog wheeling the deals that kept Mr. Fell in rare editions and tea. None of it added up to the rock-solid certainty he felt, that they had washed up in the best possible place for them tonight. 

Mr. Fell brought coffee on a tray which fit neatly across the top of three stacks of books on the handiest table. Cream and sugar were negotiated; pouring and stirring happened. “We appreciate your help so much,” said Pam. “We’re disrupting your cozy night in.”

“Not at all, my dear! All my nights are cozy nights in, or very nearly, and you mustn’t underestimate the pleasure I derive from doing a good turn for someone here or there when I can.” Mr. Fell settled himself into an armchair perpendicular to Pam and sipped his coffee. The Norths did, too. It was excellent coffee. “We must seize our chances when we get them, mustn’t we? However slight they seem. So often, we are prevented from helping anyone. It’s so frustrating! Either we have not the power, or we have not the knowledge, or we have not the right.”

“The right? That’s an odd way to put it.” Pam’s hair glowed in the warm light from the lamp on the table between her and Mr. Fell. Jerry felt as if radiance enclosed them, leaving him not exactly excluded, but outside. Yet Pam’s skirt drifted against his thigh and he was not in darkness. There was nothing for him to be outside of.

“Oddity is no bar to truth,” said Mr. Fell. “When you’ve lived as long as I have - I assure you, I’m older than I look, and I’m aware I don’t appear to be a spring chicken -“

“You do, though,” said Pam. “If you’re old, you’re very young for it.”

Mr. Fell flushed pink. “Well, it’s nice of you to say so, though I can’t help being skeptical. I feel older than London, most days. Old enough that I rarely come across a problem I haven’t had or seen before in one form or another, so I often find myself in a position to recognize a difficulty, and to have a stock of excellent advice on hand, or even to know what action to take, without being in a position that entitles me to actually _give_ the advice or _take_ the action. You can’t expect a young person, especially in times like these when so many young people are also veterans, to look kindly on a nosy old biddy like me meddling in their affairs. If I speak or act without being asked, I’ll more than likely make things worse.”

“I suppose that’s the cost of being old and wise,” said Pam. Jerry could see her thinking of the Bells. “If wise is what you are. I know _I’m_ not. I feel like there’s an, an iceberg bearing down and I can’t do anything. I can’t steer the boat or melt the ice or send the S.O.S. I’m not even _on_ the boat. It’s awful, and if it’s awful for me, how much worse is it for the sailors?”

Mr. Fell sighed, a shade dramatically, Jerry thought. But there was something dramatic about all of this. Sometimes life got dramatic. Who knew that better than the Norths, finders of bodies, trippers over clues, confidantes (especially Pam) of innocent suspects too terrified of the police to just _tell Bill what they knew already_? “The feeling of helplessness is dreadful. But one mustn’t undervalue the indirect effects we can have on each other, doing the little things that we can do. Few people get a chance to recognize the benefits that result from listening at the right time, telling the right story to the right person, being in the right place to do a small kindness, supplying a pertinent fact about icebergs, that sort of thing.”

Pam nodded. They’re keeping up with each other, thought Jerry. How? “Just as well we can’t,” he said. “Because it must work the other way, too. I don’t want to see how my snapping at a waitress leads to somebody getting shot three days later. You’d go crazy worrying about it and never get anything done.”

“That’s true.” Mr. Fell nodded to him from inside the bubble; approval, but Jerry still sat outside. “Humans aren’t designed to live at the scale necessary to see the long view, are they? We. And then there’s the issue that the feedback from failure is so much more reliable. If something you say, oh, jolts someone contemplating suicide out of the rut in his brain taking him there, how would you know? How would you even be sure it had been a danger? Whereas if you say nothing, and learn next day that they’ve been found hanging - well! You’ll wonder whether you could have helped, if you’d had the will to open your mouth, or stay half an hour longer, or invite him somewhere, for the rest of your life.”

Pam had a certain look on her face. Jerry felt uneasy. “And then there’s the times you stick your neck out trying to help and some third party chops it off.”

“Tries to,” said Pam. “They’ve never _succeeded,_ Jerry!”

Even that didn’t throw Mr. Fell off his stride. He sat in the bubble he shared with Pam, sipping tea, running with her, effortlessly. “I’ve always found that, when weighing prudence against benevolence, one is far more likely to regret the times prudence wins out. All we can do is the best we can do. No one should expect more of us than that; nor should we expect any less of ourselves. We can not control our outcomes, in a world built from millions of actions by millions of beings whose free will is equal to ours. We control only the actions we, ourselves, add to the construction of the living world. And isn’t that, in its way, the most marvelous thing?”

“No,” said Jerry.

“Yes,” said Pam. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

Jerry drank excellent coffee and wondered what was happening, what bizarre universe was his life, and how could he keep Pam safe when it was her nature to join hands with the world, and jump?

Commotion, outside; shouting, running feet; the jangle of the bell above the door Jerry thought Mr. Fell had locked and bolted after they came in. He’d seen him bolt it. Hadn’t he? Pam and Jerry looked toward the sound together, popping the bubble that hadn’t been there. Mr. Fell paused with his coffee cup in mid-air and called, clear and calm above Tchaikovsky: “Upstairs, close the door, be still, and no lights!”

Jerry reached the entry to the main room and looked up in time to see half a dozen backs - narrow backs, young backs, blue jeans and dresses and improbable shoes and bomber jackets - hurtling up the spiral staircase to the mezzanine and vanishing through a door nearly invisible between book cases, which closed behind them. Fists pounded on the front door, shaking the blind. The knob rattled. Jerry saw the bolt holding the door shut. “Police! Open up!”

Mr. Fell placed his coffee cup precisely in the center of its saucer and stood, adjusting the worn brown waistcoast under his cardigan. He picked his way through the tables and chairs and shelves and book stacks with unhurried care, his mouth and eyes pinched like those of an old and imperious lady who has found dust where dust ought not to be. “I’m coming, I’m coming! You needn’t beat the door down, my goodness!” He slid the bolt, turned the key, opened the door, and peered out. “Good evening, officers? May I help you? Is there perhaps a fire I should be aware of?”

Pam came up behind Jerry, taking his hand. She was in the same space as him again; poised, curious, watching, ready to jump but with nothing to push off from, nowhere to land.

“We’re in pursuit of suspects, sir” said one of the policemen looming in neon-tinted fog. “We saw them run in here.”

“You most certainly did not,” Mr. Fell said. 

The policeman loomed closer. “If you’ll kindly step aside -“

Mr. Fell remained where he was. The policeman had his foot in the door. He was a foot taller, and broader in the shoulders, and determined to come in. Mr. Fell did not give way by a hair or even appear to notice, peering past him. “Bertie? Bertie Shaw? That is you, isn’t it?” His voice changed, to something halfway between welcome and disapproval. “I haven’t seen you since your nan’s funeral. How is your wife? And the baby? She’ll hardly be a baby anymore.”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Fell?” The second policeman sounded uncertain as professional and personal modes of speech crossed in his mouth. “Ruth’s very well, thanks, and Vera’s growing a treat. Walks like you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t know you still lived here.”

“Where else would I live? It’s my shop.” He didn’t say “you idiot,” but Jerry was sure he wasn’t the only one who heard it.

“Sir. We saw them run in here.” The first policeman loomed harder, but made no forward progress. “Don’t try to deny it.”

“I beg your pardon?” The temperature in the room went down a few degrees. Presumably due to cold damp air coming through the door.

“Jack.” Bertie tugged at his partner’s sleeve. “Come off it. I know Mr. Fell. We made a mistake.”

“I don’t care who you know, we saw them come in here!”

“I’m astonished you can be sure of seeing anything, in this fog,” said Mr. Fell. “Who exactly are these desperate criminals that you think you saw come into my shop _through a locked and bolted door_ without my noticing?”

“It’s nothing for you to worry yourself about.” Bertie sounded apologetic, possibly waiting for the ghost of his nan to scold him for bothering this nice man.

“We raided one of those nancy bars for lewd and lascivious public indecency, and some of them ran this way when they scattered. You wouldn’t have any reason to hide people like that, now, would you, Mr. Fell?” Jack was at maximum loom, his voice turned threatening. Bertie squeaked, as one in severe social distress. “Who’s that behind you?”

“Excuse me,” said Jerry, “are you saying my wife looks like a drag queen?” They walked up behind Mr. Fell, and if Pam put a little extra sway into her step, well, a woman has her pride; and Pam sure had plenty to be proud of.

“And who might you be, sir? You don’t live here.”

“No, we don’t, thank God,” said Jerry, wondering how Bill would react to this story. “We got lost in the damn fog after asking a cop for directions, got chased by thugs without a cop in sight, got rescued by Fell, and when the cops finally show up again they say my wife looks like a man. I’m about fed up with English cops.”

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen to us in New York,” said Pam, clinging to his arm in a position that displayed her figure to advantage, and batting her eyelashes. Jerry worried she was overdoing it, but he’d thrown in the unnecessary lie about getting directions from a cop, himself, and Jack the policeman was deflating rapidly. Don’t argue with success. Maybe he wouldn’t tell Bill this story.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Bertie, pulling Jack out of the doorway. “Sorry, sir. Sorry, Mr. Fell. It was a mistake. Those pansies’ll be long gone now but I don’t reckon they’ll do much harm. We’ll take better care next time.”

“No harm done, then. Give my regards to your wife, Bertie.” A battered taxi drew up as the police retreated, its color variable in the foggy neon flicker of the street. “Ah, and here’s your taxicab, Mr. and Mrs. North. You may rely on Artie’s drivers. I assure you, your adventures are over for tonight.”

“Yours aren’t, though,” said Pam, her eyes fixed on Mr. Fell’s face as she let Jerry help her back into her coat.

He gave her a blinding smile that in no way supported Jerry’s sense of being in a world tangential to his usual reality. “Nothing will arise I haven’t dealt with before, rely upon it.”

They thanked him for the coffee, and heard him lock the door and throw the bolt again as they went down the bookstore’s steps to the waiting taxi. Jerry gave the driver, a black man with an accent more Carribean than English, the name of their hotel. As they drove away, Pam looked through the rear window, and said: “There’s a light upstairs now. He’ll be serving them tea any minute.”

“Do you get a lot of business picking people up at Mr. Fell’s in the middle of the night?” Jerry asked the driver.

“Who?” The driver did not quite laugh, but his eyes flashed up to meet Jerry’s in the rear view mirror, and they did the laughing for him. “I don’t know anybody. The boss says, drive there, pick up some people, I drive there, I pick up some people. That’s all.”

The hell it is, thought Jerry. “Got it,” he said.


	5. Saturday, 1:00 P.M. to Monday 12:00 A.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pam and Jerry lunch with the Bells before proceeding to Frankfurt. Crowley brings Mr. Fell some nice dessert.

Under the contract between the imprint Mr. Duncan Smythe represented and Mr. Ernest Bell, foreign rights were entirely the concern of Mr. Smythe’s company, except insofar as the payment for those rights counted against the advance against royalties. Nevertheless, after negotiations and a word to the contracts department, Smythe acceded happily to North’s suggestion that the Bells meet them and Pam for a celebratory meal before the Norths caught their train. In the absence of the old reliable connections of blood, class, and education, he felt, people like Americans and Bells needed to establish as many less venerable connections as they could, and he was happy to facilitate these, because he prided himself upon not being a snob, and well-connected connections were good for his bottom line. _I really need to see about getting a wife_ , he thought, observing how the cordiality between Mrs. North and Mrs. Bell smoothed out a certain masculine uncertainty between their husbands. The meal was good enough, and the atmosphere congenial enough, that he was even amused rather than embarrassed when North declared himself fed up and insisted that the waiter bring him a cocktail shaker, gin, vermouth, lemon peel, and chilled glasses, in order to demonstrate the proper concoction of a martini, then apologized that even these weren’t cold enough. 

The primary topic of discussion, of course, was Bell’s books, both _Decorations_ and the one he was working on during his evenings these days. North and Smythe joined forces in encouraging him to let his publishers worry about sales and reviews and focus his attention on the next work, which must not suffer from haste or second-guessing, but receive as much care as the first, if it were not to be stifled in its cradle. Authors have no career path, in the sense that other professions do. Their careers must be built book by book, article by article, each as sound and firm as authors, editors, and publishers can make it; but the chief responsibility is always on the author. If the first book received the kind of appreciation it deserved, it would not do to disappoint on the second one. 

Bell, like most authors, had a limit to his capacity for being the center of attention. Once he showed signs of reaching that limit, and his wife of casting about for tactful ways to rescue him, Smythe happily assisted by seizing on a casual reference by Mrs. North in order to draw out the Norths on the subject of their close association with homicide in New York. “I suppose I seem ghoulish,” he admitted, without feeling ghoulish a bit, “but the subject is such a fascinating one.”

“Sure it is,” North admitted. “But it’s one kind of interest if you read it in the newspapers, and it’s another kind of interest if you’ve seen the corpse. Or met it, before it was one. Your brain has to keep picking at things till it makes some kind of sense of that.”

“And it never quite does,” said Mrs. North. “A corpse is still a corpse, even once you know all the whos and the whys.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of context,” said Bell. “I can’t say I ever was troubled much by the whos and the whys of the corpses I’ve seen.”

“Sure you weren’t,” said North. “That’s why you wrote a whole book about it.”

“There’s a huge difference between murder and war, though,” said Smythe. “Murder is so - personal.”

“Sometimes,” said Mrs. North. “But most of the time the first one is about money, which, I don’t understand how anybody works themselves up to that point. Not killing someone in a robbery, I mean, that could just be panic, but the kind of money murderers we’ve known. It’s never someone whose family will starve. It’s someone who feels entitled to have a certain amount, and if someone else’s life comes between them and it, well, that someone else is removed.” 

“The _first_ one?” Mrs. Bell’s eyebrows rose. “How many occasions does a civilian have to kill?”

“The first one makes the others,” Mrs. North explained. “Because it isn’t one and done. Nobody’s ever killed cleanly and left no trace. Somebody somewhere knows something, or has seen something, or heard something, and then it’s - a war of one against the world, almost, because you can’t take knowledge out of people’s heads. You can only take the people with the knowledge out of the world. But the second killing creates new chances for people to know things, or one of Bill’s scientists to turn up a fingerprint or something. More, probably, because the first murder happens on the murderer’s schedule and the second one on the victim’s. Because the second murder is either a blackmailer, or someone who wants to be sure before they talk to the police, or someone who hasn’t realized what they know yet and can’t be allowed to. But they’re always irrelevant to the original motive. The second murder is always unforgivable, I think. Even the times that aren’t about money, when I’m tempted to think, Well, this victim had it coming.”

Smythe laughed in surprise. “Oh, come, Mrs. North! A woman like _you_ could never sympathize with a murderer!”

“I dunno,” said Bell, ducking his chin in that tic of his. “I can think of situations. A man has to protect his family and all.”

“Self-defense is not murder!”

“Not if someone’s pointing a gun at your baby.” Mrs. North leaned forward over her dessert. “But there’s more than one way to threaten a family. There was a man Jerry published once -“

“Townsend published him, not me,” North protested. “This was before I went off on my own.”

“You worked on the book, though. You liked how much money he made as much as anybody. Not that I’m blaming you, when I got a fur out of it. We didn’t know he was horrible, then. But he’d left his wife, and their two little girls. He never visited or wrote or sent money or anything. He didn’t even divorce her! So she left their home town, because how embarrassing, changed her name, built her own life and raised her girls and got a good job that she did well at; but she couldn’t remarry because she’d never been divorced. And then this, this _fink_ met a nice young lady and decided he wanted to marry her, and it was finally time to get a divorce.”

“Well, good,” said Mrs. Bell. “About time.”

“Yes, only, his wife wasn’t a nun, you know, and he - I don’t know how divorce laws are in England. In New York you need adultery. He could have divorced her in Nevada and left her life the way it was. But he told her he was going to sue in New York, where everybody thought she was a widow, and nobody knew what he’d been up to because he’d been living abroad, so the law would consider her the guilty party because of the not-nun business, so she wouldn’t, wouldn’t be allowed to keep her children.” Her voice hardened in a way Smythe wouldn’t have expected that her voice could harden; and looking at the Bells, he saw a similar hardness in their eyes. “He didn’t even _want_ them! He’d never shown the slightest interest in them before! Probably he would have paid their school fees and let teachers finish raising them. But he was a nasty malicious man and he wanted, oh, it’s impossible to know what he wanted at this distance, but he was willing to wreck her whole life and take her children away. Or maybe he only told her he would do that. He never had the chance to start proceedings. But she believed that he would, and she wasn’t about to let him, so - she killed him.”

“Good,” said the Bells, with one voice.

“Obviously she got caught, or you wouldn’t know all this,” said Mrs. Bell. “Did the jury give her mercy, at her trial? I would, if I were on that jury.”

“She got life, instead of the death penalty,” said North. “Most judges are squeamish about sending women to the chair. And I don’t expect her children are any too mad at her for killing the father they didn’t know, either. But the other man she killed is another story.”

“Bringing us to where we started,” said Bell. “The second murder. Of somebody who knew something.”

Mrs. North nodded, her eyes tied fast to his face. “She thought she could pull it off, because nobody in New York knew about the marriage, or who she’d been before. Only, murders aren’t only reported in local papers. And there was an old man, a weak sick harmless old man who lived a quiet retired life, who read about it, and thought about what he knew, and thought he’d better say something to somebody. He didn’t know she’d done it, but he knew about her marriage, he could connect her two lives, and he thought - well, nobody knows for sure what he thought, but he sent her a telegram. Because, probably, if she hadn’t done it, the best thing would be for her to go to the police herself, and not wait for them to dig the connection up.”

“Which they would have done,” said North. “Bill finds out all kinds of things during murder investigations that people think they can hide. Most of it he doesn't care about. Innocent people waste of lot of police time, making them hunt for their secrets instead of coming right out with them. As far as we - as Bill could tell, this old man thought the information he had would make an innocent person look guilty if she hid it, and all he wanted to do was talk her into coming clean and maybe vouch for her when she did. So he met her, and she killed a frail old man who wanted to give her a break.”

Bell frowned. “She should have cut her losses. That’s, killing civilians. Friendly fire. So much worse than killing enemies.”

“She _should_ have asked for help before she got to the point of killing at all,” said North. “She was a lawyer, but she wasn’t a divorce lawyer. If she’d gotten one - a good one - dollars to donuts, she could have kept her girls another way. Sued him for abandonment. Dug up dirt to sling back at him. Gotten leverage on him with the new prospective wife, who might’ve been real interested in what she could expect from this guy based on past performance. _Something_. It would’ve been ugly, but it wouldn’t be _murder_.” He leaned back, smashing the remains of his dessert with the back of his fork. 

“If nothing else, she’d be able to look her girls in the eye when they outgrew custody,” said Mrs. North. “Now whatever else happens, they’ve grown up wards of the state, knowing that their father was a rat and their mother’s a murderer, and where does that leave them? The poor things. My nieces know them, and the older one got married last month. At a courthouse, because there wouldn’t have been a bride’s side at church at all and she couldn't face it. She sent her mother a newspaper clipping afterward. They never visit her. They can’t stand to.”

“Sometimes,” said Bell, in a suppressed voice that failed to bottle up the Scouser, “I think the law doesn’t mind murder that much. Sometimes it seems like the law’s set up to encourage it. What did the people who wrote that divorce law _think_ would happen, putting unhappy couples in a corner like that?”

“Yeah, sometimes the law is a ass,” agreed North. “Prohibition never stopped anybody from having a drink, but it sure got a lot of people shot up. Miscegenation’s another one - colored people and whites getting married. It’s illegal in most of the south. Parts of the north, too. Colored people and whites have kids together all the time, and as long as it’s the woman who’s colored nobody says a word, but if the man tries to do the right thing and marry her? Not in Virginia, no sir! I don’t even know why things like that are offenses.”

“Because somebody’s offended?” Smythe offered, disturbed by how intense things had gotten.

North scoffed. “I’m offended by olives in martinis. So what, if it’s not my martini?”

“But if the law will take away your kids for liking olives, and the only person who knows you like olives is about to split on you, and there’s no such things as an olive lawyer -“ Bell trailed off.

“The way I see it,” said Mrs. North, “people commit murders because they think it will solve a problem. And it does. But it replaces the original problem, that might happen to anybody, with ones only murderers have. And when murder looks like the only solution, it’s time to ask yourself, do I want to have innocent people problems, or murderer problems? It’s not like there’s such a thing as a new problem. If there’s no lawyer that specializes in it, there’s at least somebody else who’s had the problem before. There’s got to be a better solution than killing people. Because once you’ve killed somebody - that’s who you are forever, isn’t it?”

“You know this, Bell,” said North. “You killed in wartime, so that made you a combat veteran and you had to write a whole book to reconcile yourself to it. It’s a great book. A lot of combat veterans will read it and recognize it and, I don’t know, maybe they’ll feel better or at least understand themselves better. But I don’t see how anybody could write their way to peace with murder one, even if they got away with it. Which isn't something they can control.”

Smythe had the uneasy feeling that something was happening here at this table, which he was paying for, that was completely beyond him. But that was ridiculous. Without him, the Norths and the Bells had no relationship; their connection ran through him. He’d lost control of the conversation, that was all, and it was time to reassert it. “I don’t suppose murderers have time to think about making their peace, with all that avoiding the hangman they have to do,” he said. “When is your train, North? Do we have time to retire to the bar?”

They retired to the bar, and talked about adoptions and great-nieces and suits and Frankfurt, both the book fair and the city, with which the Bells had at one time been tolerably familiar, though it presumably was much repaired by now. By the time the Norths departed, the odd atmosphere had dissipated, and all parties were left with an agreeable sense of mutual well-being and goodwill, from which everyone would, in the long term, profit.

The Norths returned to their hotel. “You know, the longer we sat there, the more I saw two women sitting across from us,” said Jerry. “If it weren’t for the hair and the suit -! You didn’t jump this time. You only opened your eyes. Somebody’ll see them, someday - Milo or no Milo.”

“I don’t know,” said Pam. “People see what they look for, and the suit and the hair are as far as we normally need to look. I hope they’ll go and talk to Mr. Fell now.”

“I hope if they do, he can help them, because hell if I know what they should do. Apart from contracting Crowley to do the murder in a nice clean professional way.”

“I don’t know what he is, or what anybody can do about anything, but I doubt either of them's a contract killer. You can tell he’s been dealing with this sort of thing forever. He’ll at least know something they can try. If anything ever happens to make us illegal, I’m going to Mr. Fell first.”

“Pam -“ Jerry ran his hand through his hair. “That can’t happen.”

“Are you sure? Because it was a big surprise when being Jewish became illegal in Germany.”

“Jews have been persecuted forever. When have white heterosexuals been persecuted?”

“All right. I just don’t want to take that for granted. Because we have been and the future’s always uncertain.”

“That’s not - I guess you’re right. We’d get help faster from Aunt Mary the Landlord, though. Even air mail takes time, and if the world changes that much we might be in a hurry.” He clicked the locks on his suitcase. “Is that everything?”

Pam checked the bathroom, said it was, and they summoned a bellhop to take the luggage. “Some post came for you,” said the desk clerk, as Jerry paid the bill. “It’s a good thing you didn’t check out earlier.”

“Who’d be writing to us here?” Jerry took the proffered postcard, which showed a panoramic view of Greenwich Village. “Is this meant to make us homesick?” He turned it over, to find that Dorian’s catsitting friend - who, like Dorian, was an artist - had filled most of the message space with a sketch of Martini inspecting the cushions of Jerry’s chair. Beneath she’d written: _She came out!!! She thinks I’ve hidden you!_

“Oh, how nice of her to let us know!” Pam claimed the card and admired it. “She draws cat faces awfully well, doesn’t she? That couldn’t be any cat but Martini. She’ll be so angry with us when we get home.”

“Or she’ll have forgotten all about us and will think we’re intruders,” said Jerry.

Pam told him not to be so negative and to have a little faith. The doorman found a taxi for them and their luggage. They caught the boat train to Dover, where they got on a boat to Calais, where they got on a train which, after many stops at stations much newer and shinier than the towns they served, took them to Frankfurt, where they were met by a niece, a nephew-in-law who had taken a few days leave, and a great-niece: who was not much bigger than Martini, and intermittently almost as loud.

So London continued on its damp and chilly autumn way, with new visitors replacing the Norths and its inhabitants carrying on as usual. A.Z. Fell and Co. shone its warm light onto the corner of Soho where it had operated, theoretically purveying books to the gentry, for a hundred fifty years, while small tradesmen with more lucrative businesses sold out. Clubs flashing neon promises of raucous delights were in the process of filling the holes left behind by bombs; human beings of varied and often ambiguous gender and purpose strolled through Soho at all hours looking to buy and sell what at best could only be rented; and the dingy restaurant around the corner which had housed a succession of immigrant-owned dining venues since its construction did a brisk all-night business in Chinese food. 

Sunday night was nearing Monday morning as a lanky man-shaped entity in black emerged from this storefront carrying a bag and strutted with an exaggerated feminine gait past the big black prewar car parked illegally in front of it, weaving past drug deals and negotiations on the price of satisfaction to turn down a certain alley. A locked door, which had known this entity since its construction and was never confused by vagaries of presentation, opened at the touch of a hand, closing a moment later behind the kick of a snakeskin heel. 

Mr. Fell’s commentaries on St. John and the stacks that had supported the coffee tray had been cleared away, but a tower of Father Brown stories had grown atop _The Man Who Was Thursday_ on the table by Mr. Fell’s favorite reading chair, a couple of shipping boxes full of incunabula in three languages complicated the footing, and the newest book in sight was now _Decorations_ , by Ernest Bell. Crowley topped off the Chesterton stack with the bag; pitched his hat and topcoat in the direction of the coatrack, where they hung themselves up neatly; helped himself from the decanter on the table; and sank with a sigh onto the sofa, an amalgam of limbs and contradictory gender signals, popping a number of joints in unusual places. After a strong pull at the stuff in his glass, he took off his sunglasses and dropped them by the decanter, rubbing his eyes with his free hand.

Mr. Fell, humming a harpsichord tune that had been briefly popular in 1746, the name of whose Soho-based female composer was now unknown to everyone except present company, entered from the front, spotted the figure on the sofa, and smiled. If Mr. Fell’s neighbors talked about him, they would almost certainly remark upon the variety, brightness, and uplifting quality of his smiles; but none of them had ever seen him use this smile, reserved for one entity and privacy. “Hullo, my dear! I wasn’t expecting you tonight. Hard day?”

“Hard week.” Crowley gave his eyes one final rub and opened them, revealing yellow irises with thin slits of pupil, like a snake’s. “Gender’s all over the place, can’t concentrate, doing scattershot temptations every chance I get trying to make quota and clear my plate so I can do that thing I told you about with the buses and the underground in time to put it in the next report - ugh. But I’m caught up enough for a break now.”

Mr. Fell bustled over to the sink and hot plate, taking no notice of the predatory eyes tracking his movement. “You must be miserably cold. This damp’s getting into everything.”

“I don’t need tea, angel.”

“Nonsense.”

“You keep it so warm in here I’m practically steaming.”

“Which is all very well for the outer layer but does your insides no good. You know as well as I do, the warmth from the brandy is an illusion, so you make yourself comfortable while I make a fresh pot.”

A proper pot of tea takes time, and in that time Crowley’s welter of sharp and improbable angles settled into a softer, more stable, if still slightly improbable shape. By the time the tea tray arrived, he was limp as a dishrag. Mr. Fell noticed the bag on the table, but deferred investigation while he prepared two cups: two sugars and brandy in one, nothing in the other. “Ooh, what have we here?”

“The place around the corner is Chinese now, and as I was passing I smelled egg tarts like you used to get from that old lady in Limehouse, so I thought I’d pick some up.”

“How lovely!” Mr. Fell fetched plates and forks. At the first bite of tart his face suffused with pleasure and a low moan escaped him. Crowley watched the process, unblinking, his thin mouth turning up ever so slightly at both ends. “These are scrumptious! Here, you must try one.”

“Oh, all right.” Crowley accepted one with the air of someone bestowing a great favor, popped it into his mouth whole even though the tart was slightly wider than the mouth, flexed his jaw, and swallowed. “Eh, not bad, as food goes.” He picked up the brandied tea and gulped some of that down, too.

“I feel I should warn you,” said Mr. Fell, “that we may be interrupted more than once. My nights have been busy lately. Guests upstairs and in the basement, sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t have to worry about that tonight.”

“Oh?”

Crowley smirked. “Couple of pimps got their Wrath at cross purposes, and it spread. Somehow. Big dust up. Nobody’ll have time for raids or entrapment or harassment tonight.”

“Really? Well, you slipped that one right past me, didn’t you, you fiend?” Mr. Fell wiggled, beaming. “However, you must count yourself well and truly thwarted on another front.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, indeed! The Bells came to tea today, and Maggie got Ernie to lay the whole story out for me. Milo has been stepping up his demands lately, so that Ernie has been very close to cracking, but there’s every reason to believe that the information you - accidentally - provided about Milo’s behavior during the war will render drastic action unnecessary. Fortunately I _happened_ to know exactly where to lay hands on the proof of it. As long as Ernie keeps his temper, which Maggie goes bail he will, it’s permanent stalemate and Milo will simply have to find another meal ticket, or possibly honest work.”

Crowley helped himself to more tea and brandy. “Mutually assured destruction. It’s the wave of the future. So, I’m not trading in one used blackmailer for two new murderers. Wouldn’t look good in a report, but you win some, you lose some. And honestly, Milo Trotter? One of nature’s ticks. He’ll be annoying people into sinning for years. If he goes long enough unkilled, he’ll pay off way more than two souls, not that I’d be able to sell head office on that till he dies and they run his numbers. If I were going to claim ownership, which I won’t, because they were doing it all themselves -“

“I know that, dear.Blaming your wiles is only for the report.”

“If I _had_ to, though, could I blame his survival on that probability curse?”

“I believe you could. The Norths stumbled into the shop the other night, so I took the opportunity to encourage them a bit; and the very next day, they told the Bells a story which seems to have disturbed Ernie enough to seek out someone experienced for advice, which is how Maggie _finally_ managed to drag him here to tea. The same thing might have happened had the Norths not found me, but I have every reason to believe that their curse nudged them into position to make the difference. So once again we see that evil carries the seeds of its own destruction. It will look very tidy in my report.”

Crowley made a rude gesture. _“Don’t._ ”

“Unlike _some_ people, I refuse to take more credit than I’m due.”

Crowley moaned and rolled his eyes. “Aziraphale. C’mon. How can you _not_ know how to spin a report by now? It doesn’t _matter_ how they wound up here! _You_ saw and took your chance, _you_ encouraged them, they did what _you_ wanted them to do, the humans _you_ were concerned about came to _you_ , a smidge of curse and lots of free will all around but _you_ made the difference. If anybody up there ever bothers to read your reports, which I’m not convinced anybody does, _that’s_ what they need to read. Meanwhile, if I feel like it, I can roast our demon in New York for bollocksing up my numbers. Where does he get off, cursing people like that and letting them blunder about doing good among perfectly evil crimes? I can’t imagine what he did it for, but he made it too strong by half and it’s not my fault.”

“I got a moderately good look at that curse while they were here. It seems to have been originally tied to Mr. North’s taste in cocktails, but it spread, metastasized, and attached itself to Mrs. North on the ‘one flesh’ principle. It may even affect her more, now, because she cooperates with it and Mr. North tends to resist.”

“Oh, _that_ explains why it looked such a mess when I had the mister to myself t’other day. I was only seeing part of it. I’m not surprised it’s alcohol based, though. My New York counterpart likes to claim he invented cocktails, and he has loud and obnoxious opinions on them. As retribution for a lost pub bet or whatever it seems extreme, but I take it they don’t prevent as many murders as they get involved in after the fact, and I suppose the stress must be bad for them. It doesn’t seem to be turning anybody sinward, though, which _ought_ to be the point if the blighter had his mind on the job. If _I_ had something like that active here I could spin quite a web of botheration with it. Did you get a good look at the structure?”

“If I did, I would need a good reason to share the knowledge. And if I catch you experimenting with probability manipulation by yourself -“

“All right, keep your hair on. I won’t try anything like that without you. I can see possibilities in the theory -“

“Probabilities, surely.”

Crowley rolled his eyes, an operation which involved his entire upper face. “But this particular example, in itself, doesn’t do my lot’s numbers any good. If anything, dealing with all these murders have made the Norths a sure thing for your lot. I had a good scratch around on the mister, but he’s well-armored against minor irritation. Nothing much he wants, besides his wife, books, and martinis done to specification. Sinning won’t help with any of that, so he’s hard to get a handle on. I took a shot at stirring up some jealousy, but I doubt it landed.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, poking your fingers into such a solid marital situation.”

“I was in a mood and I told you, I’ve been in a hurry to make quota. I swear, every time your lot trims your budget, my lot increases my quota. And this guy, _ugh_ , straight as a ruler, American as chop suey, kept going on about his wife and this detective chappie, and he was so bloody _secure_ , I dunno, it got up my nose.”

Mr. Fell raised one eyebrow. “Envy? _You_?”

Mr. North might feel, but Crowley knew for a fact, how far those eyes (and the less obvious ones upon which his old, old, old friend/enemy/business rival/illicit life partner could draw at need) could see into him. He almost squirmed. “Eh, I wouldn’t - that’s not exactly - all right, maybe a bit, but - you _know_ how it is, angel! Don’t look at me like that!”

“I’m not blaming you, my dear.” The tone in which Mr. Fell said “my dear” was not like the tone in which he had used those same words to address Mrs. North, or Mrs. Bell, or any number of waitresses and policemen and other human beings he’d encountered in the past few days. Only Crowley ever heard those words spoken in this way. “You’re too good a tempter to waste your time assaulting the most fortified gate, is all that I was thinking. You must have noticed that the Norths are very thoroughly married, to a degree that protects them both.” He poured more tea. “To a degree anyone denied a similar state might naturally envy. They have no way to measure how fortunate they are, to have what they have, openly.”

Volumes more might have been said upon the subject; essays and sonnets wrote themselves in the air between them; but Crowley knew what Mr. Fell wanted, Mr. Fell knew how Crowley felt, and although the specific parameters of what could and could not be done about those things were renegotiated occasionally, at the moment nothing could usefully be said about them, so they drank tea. “I made a hit on Gluttony, anyhow. Gave him a martini. No other martini will ever be that cold, that dry, or that perfectly lemon peeled again. Our demon in New York might be able to do something with that, if he shows a bit of initiative. But I suppose you blessed everybody involved here six ways from Sunday and they’re practically unassailable by now?”

Mr. Fell’s mouth was full of egg tart, and the sound he made might have been of affirmation, or of pleasure. When he finished chewing he said only: “You’ve worked much too hard this week, my dear. Shall we have some music?”

-30-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to anybody who wanted a body, or at least a little action. When I'm reading a long-running detective series, I always want the protagonist to be able to prevent a murder occasionally, instead of only coming in to clean up afterward and like as not be unable to prevent the second and third murder (other than their own). There are 26 Mr. and Mrs. North mysteries, which is quite a pile of bodies, and it probably helps their resilience to think that they may have helped two potential murderers remain innocent. Pam wonders more than once if they're cursed, so I figured - why not?


End file.
